


And I Will Not Come Back the Same

by ViaLethe



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Canonical Character Death, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Forbidden Love, Ghost (ASoIAF) is a Good Boy, Guilt, Infidelity, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 12:02:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20563997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViaLethe/pseuds/ViaLethe
Summary: An alliance between Narnia and the King in the North in Westeros is meant to be sealed by the marriage of Susan Pevensie and Robb Stark.If only she hadn't met Jon Snow first.





	And I Will Not Come Back the Same

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snacky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snacky/gifts).

> Massively AU for Game of Thrones from early in S2/A Clash of Kings.
> 
> For Snacky, because I couldn't get the idea out of my head.

Doom comes for Susan in the shape of a white wolf.

At the time, of course, all she knows is that her brothers have returned from their journey to war-torn Westeros with troubling news, a new alliance in hand, and a proposal.

“I fear their situation is dire,” Peter explains, grimacing. “Not only do they face enemies to their south, who treacherously murdered Lord Stark and hold his daughters hostage-”

“Which would be evil enough for anyone to counter,” Edmund breaks in.

“Quite,” Peter says, throwing his brother a repressive glance. “But now the new King’s brother has come down from the North with news of a greater threat mustering beyond their great wall. They need allies, or they will perish utterly.”

“And you’ve agreed to aid them out of the generosity of your heart?” Susan says.

“Don’t be so isolationist, sister,” Ed responds, offering a cheeky grin that reminds her of older days; meant to soften her heart, no doubt. “They’re good people, these Starks - those we’ve met, at least.”

“And the spies we sent to the south brought back no good reports of their enemies,” Peter says, paging through transcriptions filled with what Susan recognizes, even upside down, as various bird-speech. “This young King Joffrey and his mother have shown themselves unfit to rule. They have a care for neither the law nor their people.” His fist tightens around one sheet in particular before Susan can make out the words, crumpling them into oblivion, his face turning red.

“They’re abusing the Stark princess,” Edmund explains in a low tone, off Susan’s questioning look; she knows better than to break into Peter’s thoughts when he has that look. “The one called Sansa, who Peter’s to marry - provided we can rescue her.”

“Poor girl,” Lucy murmurs, laying a hand over Peter’s clenched one, sliding her fingers under his so subtly he scarcely seems to notice the paper falling from his hand. “Of course we must help them.”

“But the other half is up to you, Su,” Edmund says. “We said we would ask, but we made no promises on your behalf, though they thought us rather odd for it, I fear.”

“Yes,” Peter says, regaining his calm. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want it.”

Susan wonders, as they watch her, just what sort of people these Westrosi who have surrounded her brothers are, if they feel the need to reassure her so now that her life is still within her own control; she who has never allowed another to dictate a single choice she has made, as no Narnian would.

“Is he a good man?” she asks. It is all, and everything.

“I believe so,” Peter responds, his brow furrowed with the effort of remembering, of putting personality into words. “He’s an effective commander; his men respect him. He inspires great loyalty and takes responsibility for his people and especially his family.”

“Edmund?” she asks; Peter’s judgement is sound, of course, but it is limited to a certain scope. Her younger brother has always been a better judge of character, of what matters to her most.

He studies her, stretching his long legs out before him and crossing his arms. “He has an enormous direwolf who follows him about everywhere he goes,” he says, finally. “Struck me as almost Narnian, though it doesn’t speak, of course. And the ladies seem to think he’s very handsome, if you like that sort of thing.” When she narrows her eyes at him, he laughs, and throws up his hands in mock surrender, telling her what she truly wants to know. “He also brings his mother along on campaign with him, and listens to her advice! He’s not a man to scorn women, I shouldn’t think.”

“Very well then,” Susan says, after a long moment. “I will meet this King Robb of yours, and see what I think of marrying him.”

“Excellent,” Peter says, raining his sunniest smile down on her. “The Westrosi entourage is close on our tail; we stay here long enough to muster our forces, then it’s back across the sea for the lot of us.”

The girls yelp in protest at that proclamation, their brothers once again having forgotten to lead with the pertinent information that they have dozens of guests arriving, all requiring food, baths, and shelter, and although Edmund assures them it’s been handled (“Honestly, how much of an incompetent do you take me for, sisters?”), it is not in Susan’s nature to let things happen unsupervised. As a result, the night’s banquet is already underway by the time she slides late into her seat at the table on Lucy’s right.

“Is he here?” she whispers to her sister, surreptitiously checking her reflection in the blade of her dinner knife, tucking a stray wisp of hair into her coif, trying to tame her breathing after all her rushing about.

“I only just arrived myself,” Lucy says. “I believe the Westrosi are over there being monopolized by our dear brothers, but Susan-”

Lucy says something more, but Susan doesn’t hear her, couldn’t possibly hear her over the sudden pounding of her blood in her ears and her sharp intake of breath, because-

Standing there between her brothers is the most beautiful man she has ever seen. His curly hair tumbles around his face in artful disary; a short shadow of a beard helps disguise the fact that he’s very young, surely not more than a year or so older than she, and frames a mouth made for things that make Susan’s face turn pink and heated for even thinking of. And when the glance of his dark eyes flickers across the room and catches on hers, she feels she can hardly breathe, her world narrowing down to the tight confines of her body, her hand clutching at the silk of her skirts convulsively, the core of her fluttering and burning, a wild thing suddenly wakened, battering against the bars of a cage.

She watches him turn his head without taking his eyes from hers, watches him say something to Edmund; her brother turns and nods, gives her a carefree smile as though he can’t see the way her world has just spun itself apart and reassembled the pieces, all in a moment; as though it isn’t reflected on her face the way Susan knows it surely must be. As though her sudden, incandescent happiness with the turn her life has taken isn’t writ clear for everyone to see.

The fauns come through just then, bearing great platters of food and salvers of wine, breaking her line of sight, and her hand relaxes, smoothing the irreparable creases her fingers had made, twisting into the fabric over her lap.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” she says, blinking, resisting the urge to fan her face. “I didn’t hear you, what did you say?”

Lucy looks at her strangely, and offers Susan her wineglass. “Are you quite well, Susan? You look almost as though you’re glowing.” Susan takes the wine willingly, grateful for the chill of the glass against her skin, for its sweet chilled taste in her mouth, even as she notices the men walking towards them, her anticipation growing by the second. “I said that King Robb hasn’t come himself after all, with the war on and all. He’s sent his brother in his place - Jon, I believe his name is.”

The wine turns to dust and ash in Susan’s mouth, and it is only the poise of her long years as Queen that allows her to set it down calmly, that allows her to rise with grace to greet her brothers and their guest, allows her to suppress all but the slightest of shivers as she holds out her hands in greeting and feels the touch of his skin on hers; allows her to note the deep melancholy of his eyes as they meet hers once more without letting her own placid expression shift a single feature.

_

Some small part of her hopes, sitting there at the table with Lucy to her left, Jon Snow to her right, and all the best of Narnia spread out before them, that he will prove himself to be horrid; that he will be an empty headed fool, nothing more than a pretty face, or that he’ll be a great boor who lacks conversation or manners. Perhaps he’ll be one of those men unable to speak on any topics other than war and horses and his own glory, as so many of her suitors have been.

At first, she thinks her cruel hopes may have been granted, for he sits silent as the wine is poured, as the first dishes are passed around, the cheerful chatter of the room in all Narnia’s glorious voices rising around them.

Finally, he clears his throat and speaks. “Susan,” he says, not quite looking at her, but rather at his glass, as though it holds all the fascination of the world inside. “That’s a pretty name. What does it mean?”

“Lily,” she says, though how she knows this, she can’t quite recall; lilies are not common in Narnia. They must be known in Westeros, though, as Jon nods.

“It suits you,” he says softly, meeting her eyes once more, and she knows, with a sickening lurch, that he feels it too, this pull between them; the way she catches herself watching his wide wrists, so incongruous against their delicate flatware, the way the corners of his eyes fan out when he smiles. The way her eyes keep catching the sidelong glance of his on her bare shoulders, on the dark curls tumbling down her back.

“And what of your name,” she asks in return, a shade too brightly. “Jon?”

“I was named for my father’s mentor,” he says. “A man much more noble and wise than me, if my father’s tales are to be believed.”

“He sounds a lot to live up to,” Lucy pipes up, from Susan’s other side. “And your brother the King?”

Jon smiles, though whether at Lucy or merely at the mention of his brother, she could not guess. “Robb was named for the old King, our father’s closest companion.”

“Ah,” Lucy says, nodding sagely. “Flattery. Always a wise course with royalty.” Her mischievous grin is catching, and Susan is grateful as ever for her sister, rescuing her without even realizing.

“Indeed,” she says. “I can’t count the number of little furry and feathered Susans I’ve been presented with over the years, though they do seem to prefer Lucy for the girls.”

“And scaled!” Lucy says. “Don’t forget the merfolk. Or the dryads! They’re quite fond of your name.”

“Only because it sounds better in their mouths - _Soooshaan_,” she says in a low hum, trying to imitate the tongue of the Dryads, like the wind through leaves. “Oh, I can’t do it nearly as well as they make it sound.”

“I believe we’re baffling our guest,” Lucy says, laughing, and indeed Jon does look confused, though he gestures to them with raised brows.

“Continue, by all means! Don’t mind me-”

“No, she’s quite right,” Susan says, beginning to relax into familiar conversation despite the heat pooling in her body, the awareness of his leg almost close enough to touch hers beneath the table, the smell of leather and an unfamiliar, woody tang that she breathes in whenever he gestures. “Tell us of your family - Edmund mentioned your sister, Sansa, and of course we know of King Robb. Are there others?”

“Oh yes,” he says, and she listens to him speak of his siblings, of the ladylike Sansa and wild little Arya, of poor Bran, crippled in a fall, and Rickon, the baby of the family. She finds herself lost in the spell of his voice, rumbling and yet gentle, almost sleepy, lulling her into a trance, staring at his mouth despite herself.

It’s as he’s describing a small sword he had made for Arya that she feels a heavy pressure in her lap; at first she thinks her wolf guard, Fergus, has sensed her distress and broken all protocol to sneak beneath the table, but he is still there, in his place at her back.

“Your Grace,” he growls, padding up close to the back of her chair, “is this _creature_ bothering you?”

Peering under the table, she sees it is in fact an unfamiliar wolf whose head rests in her lap; a wolf with red eyes, who is pure white in contrast to Fergus’s cinnamon-trimmed grey, and so huge he’s barely able to sit up underneath the table at all. His ears are pricked as he stares up at her, but he utters not the slightest whine.

“Ghost!” Jon says, sounding slightly appalled. “I’m sorry, Your Grace.”

“He’s yours?” Susan asks, ruffling the white wolf’s fur with one hand, offering the other for him to sniff, as is only polite with canines.

“Direwolves are the symbol of House Stark,” he says. “We have a bond, Ghost and I. All my brothers and sisters have one. We found them as pups and raised them.” Ghost sniffs her fingers, then licks them appreciatively and removes himself, curling up to lay at Jon’s feet. “He likes you,” Jon says. “He’s not fond of many.”

“I have a way with wolves,” she says, and smiles over her shoulder. “Thank you, Fergus. I am quite well.” Fergus grumbles on a low inhale, but retreats to his customary place, his disdain for the mute wolf obvious.

“That’s good,” Jon says. “You’ll make a proper Stark.”

His words are polite enough, but his voice sounds bleak, and her hands turn cold, words trapped in her throat.

“Are you married, Lord Snow?” Lucy asks kindly, to cover Susan’s lapse in conversation, for Susan knows her sister, knows she could not care less about the marital status of anyone.

At her other side, Jon flinches, an almost imperceptible motion. “Just Jon, Your Grace, please. I’m not a lord. And no, I’m not married. I can’t be,” he says, and Susan fancies he looks at her too closely, just for a moment. “I took a vow, when I joined the Night’s Watch back home. They man the Wall and protect the realms of men from wild men and - oh, monsters, I guess you’d call them,” he says.

“Our brothers mentioned something of the sort,” Lucy offers.

“They’ll kill everyone,” Jon says, firmly. “And no one but your brothers seem to believe me. Even Robb is only half sure I’m not hallucinating a children’s story, and he won’t turn from his war for it.”

“And this Night’s Watch has vows?” Susan prompts, when he seems disinclined to say more. “Of…?”

“Celibacy,” he says, with a rueful smile and a hint of a blush. “To take no wives and father no children. Of course, we also vow to have no family but our brothers of the Watch, and to remain at our posts until death.” His brow furrows, and he drains his wineglass. “I’ve already broken those, leaving to join Robb. He formally released me from my oath, since he’s King in the North now and can do as he likes, but…” He shrugs, black-clad shoulders lifting lightly. “It still feels wrong. I mean to go back as soon as we’ve secured the girls and seen Joffrey punished for his crimes against our father, with or without Robb’s assistance.”

Susan makes a choice; she is a Queen, after all, and will act as one. “He will aid you,” she says, decisive. “I swear it will be done.”

His eyes meet hers frankly, assessing. “You’re very certain of yourself. My brother is his own man.”

“Any man can be swayed,” she says; this, Susan knows, if nothing else. “And if he will not go, I will come with you alone, if need be, to fight your war.”

To this incredible pronouncement, he says nothing, politely pretending not to have heard; Susan can feel Lucy’s gaze on her other side, boring into her with suppressed curiosity.

She takes a breath, but luckily, Peter saves them all by rising, signaling an end to the feast.

_

That night, Lucy pads into her rooms in her nightdress, climbing into Susan’s great bed without an invitation to sit, cross legged with her small, pointed chin in her hands as she stares at Susan, propped up against her pillows.

“Susan…” she begins.

“I do not wish to hear it, Lucy,” Susan says, shutting the book she has been pretending to read ever since she retired. “Whatever it may be, I do not want to hear it.”

Lucy raises her brows, but says nothing; a small mercy, and an uncommon one from Lucy, who always has something to say. That her sister has always been perceptive, Susan knows all too well. It is Lucy’s gift to be able to see straight to the heart of any matter, and with her proximity at dinner, there was never any hope of hiding the seething, burning, aching _thing_ that has arisen between her and Jon. “Ah!” she says, threateningly, holding up her finger as Lucy’s mouth opens again, inevitable as the sun’s rising.

“I was just going to say,” Lucy says, ducking under her sister’s suppressing finger, “that he _is_ very handsome.”

“And that is all very well, as it no doubt means his brother will be also,” Susan says, her voice crisp. Lucy looks at her doubtfully, and Susan sighs, staring up at the filmy canopy over her head. “It is an infatuation, nothing more. It will pass. Proximity always kills off these sorts of things soon enough. By the time we reach Westeros, Jon Snow will be like another brother to me, and just as annoying and tiresome as Ed and Peter can be. And not at _all_ attractive.”

“If you say so,” Lucy says, and kisses her cheek. “Be careful, Susan.”

She lays in the silent darkness, long after Lucy has gone, until she can bear it no longer, and slips a hand under her nightdress, thinking of black curls and full lips until she comes, and finally falls into sleep, to dream fitfully until morning.

_

The preparations to travel to Westeros take longer than anyone would like; Peter had sent word ahead that they would require an army, but the mustering and equipping of such a force is still a lengthy process. Susan passes the time in attempting to avoid Jon as much as possible. The sight of him still pricks her heart into beating faster, her breath coming quick and shallow every time she passes near enough to catch the scent of him, so wild and different from anything Narnian.

And she finds it difficult to avoid him completely, for Ghost has taken to shadowing her steps like his namesake, padding along silently behind her as she renews her archery skills in the training yards, sitting at her feet during meals, jumping up beside her on benches with more grace than can be expected for an animal so large, keeping her company as she studies maps of Westeros and reports sent via Seabirds from King Robb (once - only once - there is a personal letter included for her; it is sweet but stilted and brief, and Susan senses a woman’s prodding hand behind it).

One night, she hears a gentle scratching at her door, and when she glances up from her attempts to compose a suitable reply to Robb, Fergus growls from his post at the hearth.

“It’s that damned direwolf,” he says, twisting the world _direwolf_ into a sneer, as though Ghost were a completely different creature than he, with no relation at all. “I can smell his stench from here.”

“Oh hush,” Susan says, moving past him to open the door. “He smells no worse than any other wolf, I can assure you.”

“I resent that,” Fergus says, but mildly; he may disapprove of Ghost, but he will never countermand his Queen’s desires.

Ghost stares at her when she lets him in; Susan knows her siblings find the direwolf’s silence unnerving, used as they are to animals who rarely cease chattering, but she finds him soothing, somehow - a quiet, steady, gentle presence.

_Much like his master,_ she thinks, before scolding herself internally. _Don’t be such a romantic, you silly girl!_

When she goes to bed, Ghost follows her, though he turns away when she removes her dressing gown, making her laugh and ruffle his ears.

“So considerate,” she murmurs, climbing into bed, shortly joined by a furry white body, pressed up against hers with a quiet huff of breath and a cold nose against her face. She falls asleep, hands buried in his fur, and for the first time since Jon Snow entered her life, she sleeps the whole night through, undisturbed.

Ghost becomes a regular occupant of her bed thereafter; Jon looks at her searchingly the first morning, but she says nothing, not wanting to be robbed of this small piece of him, and he does not ask.

_

They leave the Cair not long after, with the greatest army Narnia has seen assembled since the days of the Witch in their train, and Jon Snow and Ghost at their head.

Lucy waves them off with suppressed tears and admonitions to be careful and to send for her the instant the battles were won, for she had fought with Edmund and drawn the short straw, and would remain to rule Narnia in her siblings’ absence.

“Don’t worry, Lucy,” Susan says, in their last embrace. “I won’t do anything you would do.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Lucy says, and though her words are for Susan, her eyes are on Jon.

“Of course he sits a horse well, too,” she says, with a sigh, to the chattering Otters who had come out of the moat to farewell their monarchs, watching the royal party depart. “She has no chance at all.”

“Bugger,” the Otters agree, rather too cheerfully, in Lucy’s opinion.

_

Somehow, when the fleet is divided, sailors and crew and provisions proportioned among the ships in turn, Susan finds herself sailing on the _Queen Helen_ with Jon Snow and his white wolf, pacing ever at his side; at her heels.

“Tell me of your country,” she says to him, coming upon him in the grey afternoon, Narnia’s golden coast already fading from view off their bow. “We’ve spoken little, these last weeks.”

“You’ve avoided me,” he says, dark gaze all for the waves, and none for her. She does not bother to deny it. Jon is not expressive, but that does not mean he lacks in perception. She has observed him enough at a distance to know that much.

“If I’m to be Queen in the North, I must know of it,” she says, instead, taking the time honored tack of simply ignoring that which one does not wish to deal with in the moment. “All of it.”

“Winter is coming,” he says, and turns his face to her then, with a crooked smile. “That is the first lesson, and the last. The words of House Stark.”

“I know winter,” she says, the seabreeze catching the bitter tones of her voice, carrying them away over the waves until they might only have been her fancy. “I have defeated it before. It does not frighten me.”

“It should,” he says. She watches him carefully from the corner of her eye; the lower lip that would protrude just a bit too much, giving him a pouting air, the stubble that shows blue-black in the light, the furrow between his brows that her fingers and lips long to soothe out, to see his face at peace for once, and the sweeter for it. “You should never have left your country. You’ll find nothing to give you joy in Westeros, that much I promise you.”

Their hands lay side by side on the ship’s rail, so close she imagines she can feel the heat passing between them, can imagine the warm, calloused feel of his skin. He has not touched her since the moment they were introduced, not once. “Won’t I?” she says, softly.

He closes his eyes in response, and turns abruptly from her. “Ghost, to me,” he calls, absently, but the great white wolf looks to Susan instead, his red eyes boring into hers, and she is caught with the terrible urge to laugh as he settles himself with a huff, curling around her feet.

“It seems he has made his choice, sir,” she says, managing with all her carefully constructed poise to sound sympathetic. “I propose we strike a bargain - you will tell me of the houses and people of the North, and I will endeavor to make myself the most agreeable creature on earth in return.” He watches her, warily, like a wounded animal in a trap. It is a delicate balance to strike, but Susan has not practiced diplomacy for years for nothing. “We must be friends, at least,” she says, so soft she is unsure at first if he hears her over the swell of the sea, unsure, even, if his reticence stems from the same place as hers. She watches the battle take place, writ freely on his face - _I really must do something about that_ she thinks, watching his thoughts move as clearly as if he were speaking out loud - and breathes easier, finally, when she sees his shoulders slump, his hard pride leaving his body along with his breath.

“Very well,” he says, joining them once more at the rail, Ghost thumping his tail against the boards twice in mute approval. “Though I warn you, I was never Maester Luwin’s best student.”

“Maester Luwin?” she says, turning the unfamiliar words in her mouth, tasting the flavor of her new land. “Start with them, then - I want to know everything.”

He laughs then, the corners of his eyes crinkling, fanning out into lines that tell all he knows of love, and laughter, and happiness, and her heart catches, and aches, and aches. “I believe you mean it,” he says, and so their lessons begin.

_

It is some days later, when her head is swimming with unfamiliar geography and heraldry, that the weather takes a turn, and the sea rises up beneath them.

Jon’s voice washes over her, a low, soothing cascade of words going ever on - something about the Manderleys, she thinks. Truth be told, she stopped listening to anything more than the sound ages ago, her ears too enchanted with the purr of his voice as her fingers trace the lists of lords and ladies he’s written down for her, in simple, bold strokes, her teeth catching at her bottom lip, the brief flares of pain not enough to keep her grounded.

“Your Grace,” he says, and she realizes with a start that it is not the first time he’s said it, cursing herself for a foolish girl, letting her attention lapse so.

“How many times must I tell you, Jon,” she says, forcing her fingers still on the paper, turning to him with a smile brighter than she feels. “Call me Susan. Please.”

A moment passes between them, and she is all too aware - aware of the quickness of her breath, the obvious rise and fall of her chest; aware of his carefully averted glance, as he has been so careful, for all these weeks; aware of the tension crackling through the room, like the lightning crackling in the clouds overhead.

She is so very, very tired of being careful.

“Susan,” he says, a husky, rasping, desperate sound, and the sea chooses that moment to swell, pitching the ship abruptly, throwing the pair of them sprawling together to the floor.

“Are you alright?” she asks, or tries to. Her tongue feels unaccountably clumsy against her teeth, her mind distracted by the feel of the hard muscles of his arm beneath her hand, of his fingers moving against the bare flesh at the back of her neck, raising prickles all along her body.

“Jon,” she says, and finds her other hand winding its way into soft black curls of its own accord, his face so close to hers she can feel his intake of breath against her cheek - 

She never knows, afterwards, who moves first. Blame the ship, then; blame the storm and its crashing waves for that spark, for the gasp that runs the length of her, breath drawn from his body into hers, as their lips meet.

He tastes of salt, and heat, of bright blood when the worried spot on her lips bursts, thinned like her resistance by the long days spent too close for comfort.

When he breaks away from her (that much she knows, for she would have gladly given him anything and everything, uncaring), she feels lost, groping her way back to solid ground, to the familiar push and pull of the sea’s gravity beneath her.

“We can’t,” he says, sounding broken. “I can’t.”

She watches him flee her cabin before she can gather the words to stop him, and not even Ghost remains to comfort her, slinking out behind his master, into the storm.

_

Jon will not stir himself from his cabin, no matter what she tries, and Fergus eyes her sidelong, disapproving with looks if not with words, as she lurks in the passage outside his door, day after day.

“Hush,” she snaps, whenever his jaws open as if to speak, and so he says nothing, though he settles himself next to her in the nights, letting her bury her hands in his silver fur. 

“Best if I’m between you and the door,” he says gruffly, the first night when he settles himself so; she does not point out the floor has always suited him well enough in the past, and he does not remark on the tears that soak his ruff.

On the third day, she catches Ghost slinking away from her door, and sends him off with a note tied around his neck.

_I don’t have to marry him, you know._

He returns to her hours later, the scrap of paper dangling from his jaws, slightly damp from its journey, but the familiar bold hand still legible on the reverse of her note.

_I can’t take what is my brother’s by right. Please don’t ask me to._

She takes the paper up on deck with her and lets it be blown away on the wind, a tiny speck sinking beneath the waves, like all her hopes.

“Not worth it,” Fergus grumbles softly that night, his soft pink tongue licking the tears from her cheek.

She wakes in misery to shouting, and a flurry of footsteps overhead; Westeros has been sighted, at last.

_

On Bear Island, the weather remains beastly; Alysanne Mormont (who does remind Susan, however improbably, of a bear) complains of the early winter storms that have battered her family’s island port for months.

Jon flees at once, taking a small party of the Westrosi who had accompanied him to Narnia, riding ahead to the Stark seat at Winterfell to survey the situation and see if Robb had left word.

The Mormont sisters do their best to rouse her, and under any other circumstances, they’d have been rather successful, for Lyanna reminds her of Lucy, fierce as a little lion cub.

Now, all she can find it in herself to do is sit and brood, and watch the storm-swept bay from the windows of the keep. So it is that she sees the brutal storm sweep in, the worst Lyanna claims to have seen in her young life; sees the Narnian fleet battered and wrecked, reduced to a quarter of its former size.

_Now,_ she knows, her heart shrinking down further, coalescing like the bitter frost that rimes the windowpanes, _we are trapped here._

_

Peter confirms her thoughts, coming to her grim-faced with Edmund the next day.

“You know I would never ask you to do anything you don’t agree to,” he says, and she looks from him to Edmund, standing in the corner, affecting nonchalance.

“Don’t look at me,” her younger brother says, studying his fingernails. “I’m only here because the _High King_ insisted, and quite disagree with the whole sordid matter.”

“Oh, do shut up, Ed,” Peter says. “You aren’t helping.”

“Excuse me for thinking it abominable to _sell_ our sister for a few ships-”

“It’s alright,” Susan says, quieting them both before a fight can break out; tensions are high, even among her own people, crammed here into this unfamiliar, icy port, with their way home in ruins. “I understand the situation quite as well as you. We’re stranded here, and need the support of the Westrosi if we ever hope to return to Narnia again.” Her brothers both look at her, silent, and she wonders that they can’t see it, the broken shell of her heart lying hollow at her feet, all her lifeblood leeched out, leaving her tired and grey, without the will to struggle. “There is no choice now. I must marry King Robb, like him or no.”

“We would find another way, Su,” Edmund begins, reaching out with a tentative hand, fingers lighting on her shoulder before she shrugs him off.

“We must win this war,” she says, and rises. “Each of us must do our duty, isn’t that so?”

She walks from the room, dignity intact, spine straight, every inch a Queen.

_

The Narnia host rides on the road to Winterfell the next day, a long, bedraggled column, fur and feathers and skin dampened and dulled by the cold mists that follow them from the sea, through pine forests that feel ancient as Narnia, without any of the love and care that her homeland offers.

“It gives me the shivers, Su,” Edmund says, riding up close to her; Fergus slinks along at her other side, pausing every so often to shake droplets of mist from his coat. “It’s not so different from home, and yet…”

“And yet, everything is different.” She looks up at the deep green of the trees shooting towards a leaden grey sky, and feels a chill along her spine that has little to do with the fog. “This place does not want us here.”

“Best pray someone does,” Edmund mutters, the sullen silence swallowing his words, leaving them cloaked in quiet.

_

By the time they come within sight of the walls of Winterfell, Susan is chilled through, and sick to death of forests, grey skies, sudden snowfalls, and the suspicious stares of a reclusive people who seem disinclined to offer the slightest warmth to outsiders.

“Smile, Su,” Peter chides her, a gentle elbow prodding her ribs. “Your betrothed may ride out to meet us, and I wouldn’t want to be sent packing back to the coast when he catches a glimpse of that sour face.”

She gives him what she thoroughly hopes is a withering stare in return. “Nothing could make me smile right now, other than a hot bath, a soft bed, and a week to sleep in it.”

At the sight of Jon Snow riding out to meet them, she finds this was a lie, and her mouth curves up, mimicking the leap of her heart in her chest.

“Your Grace,” he says. “Welcome to Winterfell.” He nods to each of them in turn; first Peter, then Edmund, and lastly Susan; last, and with a lingering look that brings the blood to her cheeks, and makes her feel, for the first time since she set foot on Westeros, warm all the way through.

_

Robb, it transpires, is not there. Susan curses herself for a coward, even as she feels the tightness in her chest dissolve at the reprieve, the knotted tension in her shoulders melt away in the heat of Winterfell’s glorious baths.

“I dreamed about you,” Bran offers, at dinner one night; she finds him an unsettling child. Sweet, but too old for his age, and prone to long, vacant stares and strange pronouncements such as this. “I didn’t know it was you at the time, of course, but now I do. You were riding a green dragon, and laughing.” He studies her, his serious little face unsmiling, and she finds it hard to suppress her own smile, the situation is so absurd. “Are there dragons where you come from?”

“Some of our people tell tales of them,” she says, for the folk of the Lone Islands do speak of great winged terrors who came in the days before Winter to steal their sheep. “But I have never seen one, much less ridden one! I think I should be too afraid of falling.”

“No,” he says, returning his attention to his plate. “You weren’t afraid. You were wearing a wolfskin, but then it blew away and you were naked. But not afraid at all.”

“Oh,” Susan says, and takes a desperate sip of wine, some small part of her wandering mind hoping that Robb will not be as strange as his little brother.

“It seemed like a good sort of dragon,” Bran says. “I don’t think he’d have let you fall. They say there’s a queen across the sea with dragons, you know. The Narrow Sea, not the one you came across.”

“Oh?” she says again, beginning to feel a trifle inadequate in her conversation, even if it is only with this rather fey child, and lets him solemnly educate her about the silver-haired dragon queen of the east.

She watches Jon, down the length of the table, while his little brother speculates on the growth rate and eating habits of dragons; watches the way the staff of this place that was his home seem to shy away from him, they way they look to Bran for their orders, even when he merely repeats what Jon has advised. And, most puzzling to her of all, the way Jon seems to take it as his due, the proud, quiet man she knows replaced by one who is meek, shoulders bowed as though prepared for some invisible blow.

“Bran,” she says, breaking into a screed on the various ways people have tried to hatch dragon eggs and their gruesome failures, “why do the people here seem to dislike your brother?”

“They don’t like that he left the Watch,” Bran says, in a tone of voice that implies this should be quite obvious. “It was his duty, and he left. Our father wouldn’t have liked it.”

“But your brother Robb freed him from those obligations,” she points out. “Surely Jon has a duty to his family as well.”

“I suppose,” Bran says, and shrugs. “I don’t think they like him sitting at the high table either. They know my mother would be angry, if she knew. She doesn’t like Jon much.”

“Oh,” Susan says. She had known, of course, that Jon was a bastard, but it had meant little to her, the concept being foreign to Narnia. There, any child that is wanted is seen as a blessing, and little dryads and foals and pups run and play and laugh together without anyone much bothering to account which one might have sprung from whom. Westeros, she begins to see, is a very different place, one where it might matter very much indeed.

“You say that a lot,” Bran says. “It’s alright, though. I like Jon, and so does Robb, and Rickon and Arya. Even Sansa, I think.”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she says. “I like him very much too.”

“That’s not much of a secret at all,” Bran scoffs, but he smiles at her openly for the first time, the pure smile a child ought to have. “Anyone who looks at you can see _that._”

“Oh,” Susan says, and sips her wine again to cover her confusion; at her side, Bran laughs, and Jon, hearing the sound, smiles down the table at them.

For that one moment, her world is true, and right.

In the next, her heart twists. In the morning, they ride south to Riverrun, and Robb.

_

The journey to Riverrun is long, and tiresome, though it begins to grow less so as they wend their way through the marshes of the Neck, the leaden, oppressive, chill air of the North left behind.

Most of her time on the road is spent with Edmund, or Peter, the three of them speculating and strategizing based on what they’ve learned of this land and its people, of their potential allies and enemies.

Jon avoids her; she waits until she is certain, waits and watches him ride with Peter, offering counsel with respect, but not deference; watches him ride with Edmund, and sees her brother’s subtle skill thaw Jon’s reticence, until he smiles and even laughs, on a rare occasion. But not when she rides up. The moment her horse draws near, Jon finds an urgent need to be elsewhere in the column.

So she waits, and uses the simplest tactic of all, coming up behind him when he is riding alone, drawing up beside him so neatly he has nowhere to go, short of reining his horse in to a total stop.

“Now it’s you who avoids me,” she says, her voice pitched low; an army on the move is never quiet, but nor does it offer much privacy.

“For good reason, Your Grace,” he says, face stiff, looking straight ahead over the endless marshes. “It’s better that way.”

“And what if I don’t agree?” she says, even more softly.

“We can’t be friends, you and I. Not when every time I look at you I want-” he cuts himself off, jaw clenched against the words, against the wanting, his face set in hard lines. “I’m to deliver you to my brother, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“And then?”

“Then I’ll follow the orders of my King, and do my duty, and try as best I can to erase the stain on my honor.”

“Is that what I am, then?” she says, with a bitter laugh. “All I will ever be to you, from this point forward?”

“No. You will be my Queen,” he says. “And my sister.”

A ball of grief begins to knot itself up in her belly, no matter how she swallows against it. “I have enough brothers already,” 

“And they love you well, Susan,” Jon says, narrowing his eyes, staring at the horizon. “As will I.”

With that, he rides away, leaving her alone, and bereft.

_

They ride across the great drawbridge at Riverrun to find the keep in chaos, the men quartered within clearly preparing to march out with all speed.

“Lord Karstark!” Jon calls, leaping from his horse to intercept an older, bearded man walking with purpose across the yard. “What’s happening? Where is the King?”

“He’s within,” Karstark says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “We’ve had word from Greyjoy that his father’s agreed to an alliance, provided he can carve out some of the coast of the Westerlands for himself. We’re off to meet him at once. Maybe we’ll even draw the old lion out of Harrenhall while we’re at it.”

Susan bristles at this, and she sees her brothers flinch as well; the lions of Lannister have been well explained to them, of course, but the bitter way the words twist in this man’s mouth are still a shock.

“We’re not in Aslan’s country anymore, for certain,” Edmund says quietly, coming to her side. “I hope they don’t mistake our heraldry.”

“Thank the Lion we use white and gold, not red,” she whispers back.

“My lords, my lady,” Jon says, walking back to meet them. “If you’ll come inside, I’m sure Robb - the King - will be grateful to know you’ve arrived safe.”

The men in the courtyard have taken notice now of the strange folk in their midst, she sees; their activity has quieted, their steps slowed. Even old Lord Karstark is staring at her now, his mouth gaping open like a fish.

“Goodness, are we that odd?” she murmurs, and sighs, before drawing herself up imperiously in the saddle and putting on what Lucy calls ‘her Queen’s mask’.

“My lord?” she says, formally, to Jon, throwing her leg over the saddle as gracefully as she can manage and holding out her hands; normally, she would dismount on her own without a thought, but a Queen demands more spectacle, and as both her brothers are still mounted (_most_ unchivalrous of them), Jon will simply have to do as the closest lord to hand; in her mind, at least.

_What a pity_, the small, sarcastic part of her mind notes, as he steps forward with his jaw set, placing his hands at her waist while she grasps his shoulders.

He makes her feel light as a feather, managing to keep her body well away from his, and she lets her hands slide from his tensed shoulders with only the barest trace of reluctance, invisible to all but him; she watches his eyes close for the briefest of seconds, feels his sigh stir the loose strands of her hair.

Before she can tear her eyes from his face, a man’s voice calls out from the steps of the keep. “Jon?”

Jon’s eyes fly open, guilt and horror written there plain for her to see for an instant, before he turns and drops to one knee in the dirt. “Your Grace.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” the other man says, and the courtyard springs to action once more as he passes through it, stopping before them to raise Jon up, clapping one leather-clad hand to his shoulder. “It’s good to see you, brother.”

He turns then to Susan, and it takes all her control not to let the mask slip. She hardly knows, in this moment, what she has feared more - that Robb will be awful, some great brute she could never respect, or that he will be the opposite, a prince out of every girl’s dearest imaginings.

“You must be Queen Susan. You’re just as lovely as your brothers and mine promised.”

She knows now, looking at his auburn curls, honest blue eyes, and wide, white smile, that the latter is the worse fear; all her brothers’ words were true, Robb is a good man, and as he takes her hand and lifts it to his lips, she feels soiled, torn apart inside.

“My lord,” she says, demurely, allowing not a hint of it to show. Instead she lets him tuck her hand into the crook of his arm, follows him as he leads her away, with a gesture and a quick invite to her brothers to renew their acquaintance.

She allows herself the briefest of glances back at Jon, standing there alone in the midst of chaos, and then she turns her face resolutely forward, and forges ahead.

_

She had feared an immediate wedding, or a long sojourn, trapped here in this watery keep with both her betrothed and his brother, but as luck and war would have it, neither was to be.

“My mother is in the south, negotiating on my behalf,” Robb explains to her, quietly, over a meal hastily thrown together by the kitchen staff once they found the great lords’ departure postponed until morning. “I would have her here before we wed. If it doesn’t bother you to wait, of course,” he says, fumbling a bit for words, suddenly seeming less certain of himself. Susan cannot help herself from laying a soothing hand over his, her empathy fighting with her reluctance to touch any other man.

“I understand, my lord,” she says. “Really, I don’t mind a delay at all.” She winces internally even as the words slip out; clearly not quite internally enough, for Robb laughs.

“It is strange, isn’t it,” he says, low voiced, just for her. “To marry someone you’ve never met. I always knew it would happen, of course, but it seemed so...I don’t know, so distant before. It’s different when there’s a real person sitting in front of you. It isn’t like the songs, where they’re always falling in love at first sight.”

“Things are often different in theory than in practice,” she says, and feels his fingers squeeze hers before she slides her hand away, tucked back into her lap, into the safety of her own shell. Her eyes she keeps resolutely on the floor, where they cannot betray her by seeking out Jon, and reflecting her joy in the sight of him.

Robb does not seem to notice.

_

That night, Robb lays out his new plans by wavering candlelight, shadows dancing over a large map, showing a dismayingly vast expanse of land. Robb himself will ride west with the bulk of his army, to join with his ally Theon Greyjoy and harry the Westerlands; Peter will join him with a portion of the Narnian army, to serve as rearguard in case of ambush.

Edmund and a second portion of the Narnians, Robb sends south, to meet his mother Catelyn and escort her back to Riverrun. “War has taken its toll on the Riverlands,” Robb explains, frowning. “They aren’t safe for travelers, not as they should be. I would feel more at ease knowing my mother has a King’s escort home.”

Susan stands in the shadows, offering little. This is not Narnia, where her voice and Lucy’s were welcomed and respected in all decisions; Robb may allow his mother in his war councils, but she is not certain enough of him to speak, not yet, and the one thing she most wants, she cannot ask of him. Jon stands next to Robb, at the far end of the table from her, staring fixedly at the map; he will not look in her direction, any more than he seems eager to meet his brother’s eyes.

“Don’t worry, my lady,” Robb says, catching her glance from the shadows, mistaking whatever he sees there for fear, perhaps. “I’ll not leave you unguarded. Jon?”

Jon starts, his head jerking up like a schoolboy caught daydreaming. “Yes, my lord?”

“You will stay here at Riverrun and guard the Queen. My uncle Edmure is a good man, with a care for his people,” he says, holding up one hand to forstall Jon’s protest, “but he is not a seasoned commander. I need someone else here I can trust, to hold the Riverlands.”

Jon says nothing, but a muscle jumps along his jaw, and she notices his right hand clenching and flexing just below the table. Still, he does not glance in her direction, and inside her two voices cry out, warring with each other: _Yes, please, give me a few more days where he can be mine and I his_, against _Sweet Lion, don’t leave me alone with him, don’t you see what it will do to us?_ She wonders if Jon hears his own voices, as she watches his fingers flex, almost rhythmically.

“Please, brother,” Robb says, quieter, for Jon’s reluctance is obvious. “I need this from you.” Robb’s tact is admirable; he needs Peter, with his experience in war, at the forefront of the battle with him, and he will not send Jon to retrieve a woman who despises him, yet he still seeks to make certain Jon does not feel the lack of an important role to play. That he does so by undermining his own uncle is curious, but still, Susan admires the ploy, deft as it is for a military man.

“Of course,” Jon says. “Lord Edmure will dislike it, but I’ll do what is asked of me.”

“It’s settled then,” Robb says, and smiles; later, when he escorts Susan to her rooms, he asks, “Is there anything you would have of me before I go?”

She shakes her head, not trusting to words, and if he takes her for a frightened, foolish girl, so be it.  
_

In the morning, when the men make to depart once more, Peter and Edmund look unbearably wearied as she kisses them farewell, with promises to take special care; Lucy and her cordial are an ocean away, and Susan’s heart trips over itself, leaving her shivering, thinking of the dangers in this place. 

“You should go back inside, my lady,” Robb says, coming up behind her on the courtyard steps and taking her by the elbow. The grey light of dawn leeches the color from his hair, turning it darker; but not enough, Susan thinks, to make him truly resemble his half brother. It will never be quite enough.

“Farewell, my lord,” she says, with a chilled, half smile; it is the best she can do. “I will await your safe return.”

“You must call me Robb,” he says, and hesitates, before surging forward to brush his lips to hers. Her body feels stiff as the steel at his side, and her mouth is frozen, unresponsive, her fingers moving to cover her lips as he pulls away.

“Forgive me,” he says, and smiles, just slightly. “I could not leave you without a proper farewell.”

She makes no response, but he does not seem to expect one, moving off to mount his horse in a swift, graceful motion.

When she turns to mount the steps back into the keep, she sees Jon standing above, dark eyes watching her with an unfathomable look, before he turns away, leaving her standing there in the cold wind, alone.

_

Were it not for the Birds, she would surely go mad in the following weeks. Life in Riverrun is damp, and chill, and Susan feels constantly under surveillance, whether by the Riverfolk themselves, curious about _the foreign Queen who talks to animals_, or simply by Robb’s uncle Edmure, who seems to dislike Jon just as much as predicted, and who is always there with them, during mealtimes at table, following Susan out to the stables, shadowing her steps like a suspicious old beaver whenever he finds the time.

Not that it matters, for Jon clearly has little wish to be alone with her. Once, they cross paths in a darkened passageway at night; her fingers brush against his almost without intention, for the passage is narrow, before she finds herself crushed in his embrace, his face against her hair for the briefest of moments, feeling him breathe in her scent, his hand tracing the line of her back, from shoulder to hip.

And then he is gone, leaving her tingling and desperate, to twist in the sheets of her great, empty bed, with only her hands for company.

Her one solace, (besides that chance meeting; the way his fingers pressed into the soft flesh where waist flares into hip, his thumb hard against her hipbone), is exploring the lands around Riverrun, and making friends with Edmure’s Riverfolk. She and Fergus walk calmly among them, gamely offering help with whatever tasks are at hand until they begin to thaw, and their greetings of _my lady_ sound warm rather than begrudging. The men of the keep itself she wins over with friendly archery contests, the burn in her arms and shoulders a distraction; a relief.

And when the birds begin to return - the great Ravens, Griff and Glint, the family of Crows who call themselves the Slaughters (‘it’s cause we’re a _murder_, see?’ they tell anyone who will listen, with great eagerness), her darling Falcon, Brightalon, and even the unassuming Pigeon pair whose names always seem to escape her - with news from Peter, from Edmund, from Winterfell and further corners of the realms, she feels even more in her element, gathering each tidbit, contemplating and piecing together, learning all she can.

Between the love of the Riverfolk and the gathering of intelligence, she begins to feel like herself again, so much so that even Edmure notices, and leaves off his nannying of her, looking at her with new respect.

As does Jon, thawing gradually like the snow of his name.

“What are you reading?” he asks her one night, coming upon her alone in the small room at the center of the keep that passes for a library, its location shielding the books and scrolls from the river damp.

“_The Tale of Florian and Jonquil_” she says, turning the cover up towards him from where she sits at the hearth, amongst heaps of furs, and making a face. “It’s not to my taste, I’m afraid.”

“_All men are fools, and all men are knights, where women are concerned?_” Jon quotes, taking a seat opposite her, stretching his legs out to the fire. Ghost eyes them before settling far away on the cold flagstones, his pink tongue lolling.

“Precisely,” she says. “You know it?”

He laughs, a low rumble deep in his throat. “It’s one of the most famous legends in Westeros. My sister sang that damned song every day for a month straight, until Robb threatened to dunk her head in the Godswood pool.”

“That is a much better story,” Susan says, and studies the firelight limning the edges of his throat, wondering how close she would need to come before her eyes could catch the jump of his pulse beneath the skin; wondering how it would leap if she touched him.

“Susan,” he says, sounding ragged enough to tear her attention back to his face. “You have to stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?” she asks, softly, stirring in her furs, suddenly too warm.

“The way Ghost looks at meat,” he says. From any other man, it would be a joke; from Jon, she isn’t so certain. Sometimes she feels he’s more than part wolf himself.

Sometimes she feels she is.

“Perhaps I’m hungry,” she says, shifting forwards, reaching up to lay her hand, lightly, above the top of his boot, fingers hot against the crease of his knee.

All she can hear is the crackle of the fire and the catch of his breath, as she studies her effect on him, bringing her other hand to rest on his thigh.

“Jon,” she says, not knowing whether it’s a question or a plea.

Before he can respond, Ghost’s ears perk up, his snowy head lifting as he looks to the doorway; she manages to resettle herself among the furs with only a modicum of fuss, heart pounding in her throat before she recognizes the click of Fergus’s claws along the floor.

“Your Grace?” he says, betraying nothing by look or sound. Still, she knows Fergus well; he has been her guard all his life, trained for the post by his mother before him. She sees the twitch of his nose, the way his right ear swivels, just slightly, towards Jon, and knows that he knows. “I’ve come to escort you up to bed.”

“You’re meant to be a bodyguard, not a nursemaid,” she grumbles, but the moment is already lost, Jon and Ghost both rising to leave.

“And it is my job to protect you,” Fergus says, watching Jon leave the room with barely a choked _goodnight_. “Even from yourself.”

_

Three days later, Susan makes her fatal error.

Fed up to the teeth with Riverrun, its watery confines suddenly seeming too small, the walls too high, the yards too crowded, she slips out to the stables and rides, further than she has before, east along the riverbanks until the castle fades from sight.

She does not pull up until her horse’s flanks are heaving, Fergus breathing in sharp pants as he lopes along beside them.

It has been weeks now since the men departed; just yesterday Glint brought her word that the coast of the Westlands was theirs, and reassurances from Peter that all was well. That soon, they would return.

_It’s not long enough_, she thinks, staring over the floodplains ahead of her until her eyes blur. _It would never be long enough_, she knows.

When she dismounts, Fergus looks about, wary. “We should go back,” he begins.

“There’s no one about for miles,” Susan says, impatient. “You would smell them.”

“This whole country reeks of war and death,” he growls, slinking to her side, snout to the ground. “I can’t rid my nose of it.”

“I don’t know that I like it here either, Fergus,” she says. “I believe I don’t, actually.”

The ground here is smooth and even, and she loses herself in contemplation as they walk along, in the tangle that her life has become, limbs caught in knots of logic and necessity and feeling until they render her immobile, an observer in a drama playing out without any assistance or will from her.

_Robb is a good man,_ she tells herself. _He will make a good husband._

And so he would - if she had never met Jon Snow. She remembers Robb’s kiss on the stairs, polite, cool, brief, and how inert she had felt; she remembers the dark look in Jon’s eyes after, and shudders, a warm thing unspooling low in her belly.

_One man’s look excites me more than another’s kiss_, she thinks, bitterly. _What kind of wife will I make, then?_

“One who is a Queen,” she reminds herself, under her breath, and tips her face to the sky, breathing deep until the threatened tears recede, leaving her face smooth, and blank, and still.

Until Fergus growls, the low sound setting her on edge. _Fool, fool, not bringing your bow_, she thinks, her earlier bravado to Fergus forgotten; in truth, she’d never meant to go so far.

By now, even she can hear the hoofbeats, the jingle of a harness, though a copse of trees shields them from view, for now.

Fergus lifts his head, lips curling, nose working furiously in the air. “Ah,” he says, his great ruff of fur settling, tail lowering. “You can relax, Your Grace. It’s only your precious Lord Snow.”

“Fergus!” she hisses. “Do _not_ call him that.”

The wolf merely gives her a long look and settles on his haunches, elaborately yawning.

When Jon breaks through the trees, she’s gratified to note that he looks relieved; relieved, and angry also, as he jumps from his horse and stalks towards her.

“What are you doing on your own, so far from the castle?” he says, skipping the preliminaries. “It isn’t safe.”

She throws her head back, standing her ground and giving him a look that has frozen many lesser men in their tracks. It barely slows Jon. “I’m not by myself,” she says, indicating Fergus with a nod, who huffs in the canine version of a grunt.

“One wolf is not enough!” he says, stopping just short of her, reaching out as though to grab her by the shoulders, before the look on her face finally reaches him. He rakes a hand through his curls instead, setting them askew. “You didn’t even leave word. No one knew where you’d gone.”

“You found me easily enough,” she says, trying to keep her voice from sliding into petulance. Ghost peers at her from behind Jon’s horse, clearly unrepentant for his part in this.

“Your scent is easy to pick up.”

“_She_ doesn’t smell like death,” Fergus grumbles to himself.

“So you’ve found me,” she says. “Are you pleased with yourself, or is there something more you require?”

“I’m not _requiring_ anything,” he says, the muscles of his jaw flexing. “I don’t require things of Kings and Queens. I only mean to _suggest_ it would be a good idea to return to the castle, Your Grace.”

“I hate it when you call me that,” she says, turning and walking away before he can see the ridiculous tears that have sprung once more to her eyes. “You, of all people.”

“Your- Susan- wait,” he says, and she can hear him following, horses and wolves in tow. “You’re my Queen,” he finishes, miserably, coming to her side, anger tamped down. “People would notice, if I was too familiar.”

“Yes,” she says, pushing back the hair that has escaped her braids in the wind, blows now across her face. “But there’s no one to notice out here. We might never be alone like this again.”

“Is that a bad thing, though?” he asks, softly, and she draws a deep, shuddering breath, breathing in and out in a careful rhythm as they walk along; she learned long ago how to stop her tears from spilling.

When she stops short on the riverbank, staring at the odd sight before them, he nearly runs into her, the distance between them is so small; so small despite his words. “What on earth is that?” she asks, not so much because she cares what the sudden tower is, sitting on a little green rise in the midst of a mucky, rock strewn channel in the earth, but because some distraction, any distraction, is welcome. Anything to remain in this moment, to keep from returning to Riverrrun and the walls that are closing slowly around her.

“I’m not certain,” Jon admits. “Edmure mentioned something about a hermitage, once. His grandfather built it - or great grandfather maybe, I don’t remember - for some monk of the Faith.”

She tips her head to the side, considering the tower. It looks remarkably sturdy, for such a lonely place, rising high above them, a slender, graceful column of pale stone, set with narrow windows. “Do you suppose anyone lives there now?”

“Not if they have any sense,” Fergus says, scenting the air. “Nothing here but damp and weeds, my lady.”

“Let’s go see,” she says, implusively, for something about the little building charms her; its delicate incongruity, or its bizarre position in what she now realizes, as they draw closer, is the middle of a dry riverbed. “What do you suppose has happened to the water?” There are a series of wide, flat stepping stones laid out from the slope of banks to the little island, but only a trickle of water, wending its way between pools.

“The Tullys,” Jon says, eyeing the tower, and the riverbed below it. “They dam the river upstream to power their mills and forges during the day, and release it at night. This place will flood by sundown.”

“Then it’s settled,” Susan says. “That’s hours yet.” She’s scrambled down the bank before he can stop her, balancing carefully on the slick stones. Fergus growls, but follows her, picking his way delicately across the water; on the bank, Jon sighs, before tying up the horses to follow her, apparently deciding it isn’t worth the fight.

The little sandstone tower’s door opens easily at her touch, no hint of rust on the hinges, old though they must be. Inside, the single room stretches upwards, the peak nearly lost in the dim light filtering in through the seven arched windows, the stained glass that once filled them now mostly shattered, lying in painted bits across the floor.

Even still - “It’s beautiful,” she breathes, as Jon’s shadow fills the doorway behind her. For the walls are filled, every bit of them, with carvings; fish, and waves, and tiny ships low down, near the floor, spiraling up through six great figures she recognizes from the little light-filled chapel of the Faith of the Seven at Riverrun. And against the back wall, directly opposite her, an immense seven-pointed star.

“He must have been a very respected monk for someone to have gone to all this trouble,” Jon says doubtfully, looking around with ill-concealed unease.

Reaching out a hand, she brushes her fingers over the incised marks, closing her eyes; Jon’s discomfort with any worship not his own does not apply to her, for she has seen the face of her god, felt his breath upon her cheek. All worship given out of love is worship of her Lion under a different face, so far as she is concerned. “Or a very talented and dedicated one,” she says, a vision playing in her mind of an isolated monk, safe here from the world, free to do what he loved.

Her moment of contemplation is quite spoiled when Fergus’s stomach rumbles loudly. “Your pardon, Your Grace,” he mutters, ears back, looking at the floor, but Susan only laughs.

“Poor Fergus! I did promise you we’d head back hours ago, didn’t I.” She looks at Jon, still standing barely inside the doorway, then back at her guard. _Neither of them will like it_, she thinks, _but after all, who is Queen here?_ “You should go back,” she says, her tone brisk, brooking no disagreement. “I have Jon with me for protection, and Ghost lurking somewhere about as well. I would like to stay here, and study these carvings.”

She watches the silver-white fur of his hackles bristle, and raises one imperious eyebrow.

The droop of his tail tells her she has won, as is nearly always the case. “As you wish, Your Grace,” he says, bowing his head. “If you fail to bring her home intact, I will eat your pet,” he grumbles to Jon as he passes. She knows she will pay later for this transgression in the form of multiple lectures on _being dutiful_ and _taking care_, but she can’t be bothered to mind, not when Jon is right there, so close, with no one else around for miles. Not when she can pretend, for just a few moments longer, that he might ever be hers.

One golden shaft of sunlight falls between them, dust swirling in its light; it gives his skin a warm flush, picks out the brown glints among his black hair, the only color in the unrelieved black and white of him. She feels herself staring, and does not care; sees him staring back, and shivers.

“You don’t care about the carvings.”

“No. Can’t we just- just talk?” she says. “Just be a man and a woman who enjoy each other’s company for a little while? Then we’ll go back to Riverrun and await...” she pauses, temporizing, groping for words to make the personal and immediate sound safe, and distant. “Await what must be,” she finishes. “But until then…”

“We can hide here from the rest of the world?” he says. The corner of his mouth lifts in a smile that fails to reach his eyes, but here and now, she will settle for anything.

“Exactly,” she says, and smiles.

It is some time later, after she has spread her cloak on the floor and they’ve eaten what provisions each had tucked in their saddlebags, after she has coaxed out several stories from him (she has learned by now that his father, his sister Arya, and Bran are all safe topics, while Robb and his mother are decidedly not), that she sees the little door tucked into the wall.

“What do you suppose is down there?” she wonders, looking down the dark little flight of steps that presents itself behind the door.

“Spiderwebs and mold,” he says firmly. “It feels like a crypt.”

“Surely not,” she laughs, and plunges down without hesitation; it has been many years since she feared the darkness. “Are you coming?”

At the foot of the finely-wrought spiral of steps, a low room opens out, quickly lost to darkness.

“It must be where the monk actually lived,” she says. “Look, there’s candles here still in this niche.” It is only a moment’s work to light them, and by their fitful light, she sees her guess was correct; the room is tiny, square, and barren. A long shelf she supposed was meant as a bed is carved out in one wall, and the art of the tower room continues here, sea life decorating the greenish grey of the stone.

“More of a cell than anything,” Jon says, and Susan finds she cannot disagree; besides, it _does_ smell rather of mildew.

“Very well,” she says, meaning to finish with _let us go_, only three things happen at once. First, thunder rumbles in the distance. Second, the wind picks up, moaning eerily through the tower windows above. And third, as the wind whips through the little building, the main door slams - and with it, the door at the top of the stairs.

Though she would not care to admit it, her heart is pounding as they surge up the narrow stair, the tower no longer seeming so welcoming.

It nearly stops when she runs into Jon, groping in the semi-darkness at the top, pushing at the door. 

“It’s stuck.”

_

She watches him throw himself against the stone, over and over, long after the futility has become obvious; watches until he slumps against it, sliding to sit on the stairs.

“It’s wedged shut on the other side, somehow,” he says. “I can’t force it.”

Susan shudders, and turns her back, making her way on trembling legs back down the stairs, candle held high. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You were right. We never should have come down.”

She hears a pained grunt from the stairs, and winces, thinking of his bruised shoulder. “It will be fine,” he says, shuffling down the stairs, the candlelight throwing out his shadow behind him, a monster looming in the darkness. “Fergus will worry when you don’t return, and bring people to find us. There’s certainly nothing to harm us here.”

Faintly, through layers of stone, she can hear heavy rainfall lashing the building; a small grille in the ceiling (placed, she supposed, for airflow, for that poor, long dead monk) drips as she watches, the water running down to join a small pool already forming in one corner.

Icy talons lodge themselves in her belly. The pool is too large to be mere rainwater. Tracing it to the wall with her eye, she sees a crack in the stonework of the wall, narrow at the ceiling, wide as a handsbreadth at the base.

“Jon,” she breathes with realization, holding her candle so high the flame touches the ceiling, “_look_.”

The green-grey cast to the stone she noticed earlier goes all the way up; covers the ceiling, winds its way up the narrow stair, coats even the door, stopping less than a finger’s width from the very top.

“This room floods,” he says, voice thick. “When they release the river…”

“With the rain added to it,” she finishes, “we’ll drown.”

_

There is no way to tell, in the candlelit darkness, how much fitful, rain-soaked daylight remains.

She tucks herself up onto the bed shelf, pulling her knees to her chest, and shivers, until he joins her, wrapping arms and cloak around her.

“I don’t want to die,” she admits, tipping her head back against his shoulder, feeling all his body stiff against hers, as hard and tense as she feels herself.

“Neither do I,” he says, breathing against her hair.

“I wish it had been you,” she whispers, the admission torn from her by a heart that no longer cares for duty and the boundaries of right and wrong; not here, not as the hours of her life flow away, dripping slowly onto the floor. “You do know that.”

“Susan-”

“What does it matter now?” she says, her voice low, choked. “What difference can it possibly make to anyone what we say or do now, except to each other?”

He sighs, and his right hand clenches against her, fingers flexing open on her arm. “Yes, I know it. Of course I know it.” He laughs, the sound bitter and chill in the darkness. “The first time I saw you, sitting there in the hall beside your sister, I prayed to every god I knew that she was Susan, not you. But I knew they’d never be so kind as to let me have you.”

“You underrate yourself,” she says, tipping her head back to look up at his face, his stubble scraping across her temple.

“I never wanted to be a king, not until that moment.”

“I would rather be just Susan Pevensie than a Queen,” she says, “and able to give my heart where I will.” She giggles, trying desperately to hold back the hysterical laughter threatening to bubble up, to overflow. “I did my duty, always. And now it all ends here, with everything still undone. So many things undone.”

“For both of us,” he says, and she twists to be able to see his face, solemn as ever. “I’ll never know who my mother was. Never see my sisters safe and free, never have a holdfast of my own.”

“I’ll never see Narnia again,” she whispers. “Never see my brothers’ children, or have one of my own.” She looks at his face, staring down at hers in their small pool of light, and shivers, painfully aware of every bit of her body, crying out for whatever life can be clung to, driven by a sudden, primal urge. He is still the most beautiful man she has ever seen. “I’ll never lie with a man.”

He hesitates. “Susan-”

“Please,” she says, shifting her body up against his, chest to chest, legs on either side of his, holding herself over his lap. “This is the last thing I’ll ever ask of you, Jon Snow.” She touches her forehead to his, listening to his ragged breathing, her hands coming up to cup his face, beard scratching her palms. A Queen does not beg, but Susan does. “_Please_.”

“Gods, Susan,” he moans, and then his mouth is on hers, hot and demanding and wanting. She feels the pull on her scalp, a sweet, delicious tug, as he grasps her braid, pulling her head back and kissing his way down her exposed neck, leaving a trail of fire, setting all the nerves of her skin alight.

She fumbles with the laces of her dress, yanking impatiently until her shoulders wriggle free of it; she gasps as his hands find her breasts through the thin linen of her chemise, nipples growing hard against him until she whimpers with need, pulling his mouth back to hers, letting him swallow her moans.

Her fingers make quick work of his cloak, letting it fall to cover the stone beneath them; she finds herself torn between the desire to have his hands on her body forever, and the need to see more of him.

“Please,” she says on a gasp, breaking away from his lips, “I want to feel you.” He seems to take her meaning, hands working at his own buckles and laces while she takes the opportunity to slide her skirts and underclothes from her hips.

His body, once bared to her, is breathtaking, and the look in his eyes as he drinks her in burns her straight through.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says, tipping her back to lie on their discarded clothing; she lets her hands roam free over him, from chest to shoulders, down the planes of his back to grab his sweet, rounded arse.

When his fingers seek out her core, she cries out, slick and aching already, the long months and her body’s wild desire built to a peak.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks, pulling back sharply. “I didn’t mean- I’ve never been with a woman before,” he admits, letting his head drop.

“It’s alright,” she says, her heart racing so fast she feels it might burst, and draws him down to kiss him once more. “It’s just us,” she says, against his lips, and reaches down between them, feeling the silken skin of his cock, wrapping her hand around it, his strangled gasp against her mouth making her moan. 

When she guides him to her entrance, he hesitates only a second before sliding inside her, and then there is only the frantic, driving _need_ as they move together, until she can bear it no longer, wrapping her legs around him and grinding her body against his where they meet until he cries out, sharp, burying his face against her neck, and she follows after, tumbling down into sweet, bright bliss.

In the silence that follows, there is only their rapid breathing, and the steady _drip drip drip_ of the rain.

_

She awakens with a start, chilled and confused, surprised to find she had slept at all. Underneath her, Jon’s skin is cool, clammy even as she spreads her hands over his chest, his eyes fixed shut and muscles rigid beneath her fingers.

He mutters something in his sleep before gasping so that it frightens her, and she touches his face to find it cold, chilled as well. “Jon?” she says, shaking his shoulder, repeating herself louder, digging her fingers in until his eyes fly open, a strangled “Ghost!” escaping his mouth.

“Susan?” he says, drawing a hand over his face. “I’m sorry, I must have been dreaming.” 

“Of what?” she asks, stroking her hand through his hair, as she has always longed to do.

“Racing water along a river, I think, with...huge birds flying overhead.”

“I can’t imagine why you would have dreamed that,” she says, trying to sound light, but her words fall flat in the chill, and she shivers, reaching for her clothes.

She does not mention the moment his eyes first opened, when she could have sworn they were pure white; surely it was just a trick of the light.

“It felt so real,” he murmurs, dressing himself as she leans over the edge of their sanctuary, peering at the floor below.

It shimmers with her reflection, in an inch or so of rainwater; ripples spreading across as the drips fall, faster now, as his face appears in reflection behind hers, framed by his dark halo.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” he says, and she turns to him, shaking her head.

“Never apologize to me,” she whispers, letting him take her in his arms, wrapped safe for this small space. “If I have to die, I’d rather die happy.”

He kisses her then, gently, savoring, and for a moment she forgets the sodden chill of the air around them, the cold stone underneath them, forgets everything but him.

Until - “Do you hear that?” he asks, pulling back from her.

At first she hears nothing but the roar of her blood rushing past her ears, until the roar grows and grows, and she realizes it for what it is.

The river is coming.

_

“Up to the door,” Jon orders, jumping down with a splash, reaching back to help her down. She finds it hard to move quickly, limbs stiff with cold and frozen with fear, her heart racing into her throat now that the inevitable has finally arrived.

They climb the narrow stairs together, and Jon renews his desperate onslaught on the door as she turns back and watches; watches as the crack in the wall disappears behind a seething, dark mass of water, rising faster than she had ever anticipated.

_Please_, she prays, as the water swirls below them, climbing the steps in an inexorable tide. _Please, not yet_.

The sounds outside come as the water hits her legs, making her gasp with the cold; sounds that are muffled, filtered through layers of stone, but there nevertheless.

“Susan!” The frantic, familiar yell sounds sweet to her as Aslan’s purr, as the water creeps over her waist.

“Edmund!” she screams, throwing herself against the door, wedged in next to Jon, her voice filling their tiny pocket of air, deadened by the water swirling ever higher. “Edmund, _hurry_!”

“Hold on, Su!” she hears, and then a scraping noise, and several sharp, hollow _taps_ against the stone, unbelievably loud in her ears, face pressed to the door, her chin wet now with the encroaching river. She takes one last, deep breath; beneath the water, her hand is clasped with Jon’s, fingers wound so tight she can no longer feel where she leaves off and he begins.

And then, the door shatters, the press of water behind flinging them into the room amid a flurry of oaths and scrambling talons and feathers.

The talons and feathers, she sees, sitting up amongst the wreckage, belong to several Griffons looming above her, massive in the enclosed space, and seeming quite disgruntled at their feet having taken a wetting. The largest dips her great head to Susan before turning, rubbing the stone dust from her beak into the feathers beneath her wing.

“A griffon’s beak can break anything,” Ed says, flinging himself against her in a violent embrace. “What in the world were you doing down there?”

“We were trapped,” she says, feebly. Next to her, there’s a soggy white blur, before Jon is knocked to the floor by an enthusiastic, if dripping wet, Ghost.

“You can thank him for your rescue,” Ed says, nodding to the wolf. “We were nearly back to Riverrun when he found us, and behaved so odd we knew something was wrong. The Animals said he positively reeked of fear. He led us straight down the riverbank to you. Thank the Lion we brought the Griffons with us; we feared we might need to fly you back.”

“I think you may,” she says, lips bloodless, the shock of the moment ebbing from her, leaving her sore, and cold to the bone.

“Of course,” he says, and turns away, giving orders, stalking to the door; it is Jon who pulls her up from the floor, a Jon who looks pale and drawn, and does not meet her eyes.

He leaves her before she can so much as open her mouth. _What is there to say?_ she thinks. _Nothing. It is over._

Edmund watches as Jon passes by without so much as a look, watches Susan as she gathers herself and follows.

At the door, he takes her by the arm, gentle but firm. “Susan, what did you do?” he asks, in a low undertone, his eyes searching her face. 

“I lived,” she says, and brushes past him, climbing wearily onto Griffonback. Edmund has always seen too much.

_

She spends the next week in a haze of fever, glad enough for the excuse to remain in bed when her wits return. Fergus lays beside her in the bed when the chills take hold of her, bathing her hands with his warm tongue, his downcast eyes a mute apology for leaving her, for all that she had ordered it. She wonders if he will ever forgive himself; if she will forgive herself.

Edmund visits, and brings her the news; one of the old King’s brothers dead in the south at the other’s hand, and that one moving on the seat of the Seven Kingdoms, the city of King’s Landing, even as they spoke.

“We have our Birds watching, and waiting to report,” he says. “Perhaps they’ll rid us of themselves without our assistance.”

She cannot find it in herself to care; he has also told her Peter’s army has been sighted, and Robb’s; they will arrive within the week. She swears Edmund to secrecy on the subject of her misadventure, phrasing it as a desire not to look foolish, and in need of rescue.

Jon does not visit her, though Ed tells her he’s well enough; not even Ghost sticks his nose over her threshold.

The night before the Kings are due to arrive, she seeks him out, rising from her bed, too pale and thin for health, but steady enough on her feet. When she finds him, she thinks at first he will refuse to speak to her, closing his eyes against the sight of her.

“I had to see you,” she says, quickly, before he can flee. “I couldn’t let- couldn’t go on if we didn’t speak about it.”

“You shouldn’t be seen with me,” he says, quietly, though there’s no one around to hear; Fergus has made certain of that. “If Robb’s lady mother were to catch us-”

Catelyn Stark is an efficient woman, quick and sharp, who misses little; Susan fears what she might observe if she sees them as well, and speaks quickly.

“I don’t have to marry him.” It cuts Jon off well enough; she thinks back to her note, so long ago on the ship from Narnia after they first kissed. Surely what they’ve done now is much worse.

“You would be ruined,” he says, voice flat.

“Here, perhaps. Not in Narnia.” _Not where it truly matters_, she thinks, but does not say.

“You have to do what you think is best,” he says, and her heart twists at the look on his face, so empty and hopeless. “He won’t take it well. Your brothers, your army - what will happen to them all, if you break this alliance, if he knows what we’ve done?”

She can remember, if she thinks back very hard, the moment she realized that the thrones at Cair Paravel were traps as much as rewards; cages to turn children into monarchs, to turn individuals into rulers. _Sometimes, child, you must be the Queen, and not the girl,_ Aslan had told her once, when she had prayed until she wept for wisdom. _That is the way of Duty. Power without sacrifice is a terrible thing._ She draws a trembling breath, and steels her spine, letting a cold stone door close on her bright dreams, for good this time.

“And what would happen to you?” she says, softly, meeting his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jon. I didn’t think- I’ve made a mess of everything.”

“We have,” he corrects. “Tell me you understand,” he says, and she longs to cross the space between them, so small, so easily breached. “I would have given up everything for you, if I could. But I can’t betray my brother. I promised to protect the realms, and I can’t betray that either.”

“What kind of man would you be, if you could?” she asks, tears shining in her eyes. “And what kind of woman would I be if I asked you to?” The tears fall this time, a slow trail down her face, but her voice is steady. “Enough, then. Let it be finished.”

“As though it never happened?” he says, voice low.

“Never that. Not to us. But to everyone else…” she sighs, and closes her eyes. “Yes.”

“You’ll marry him, then?” he says, and she hears him move closer, not daring to open her eyes.

“Yes,” she says, a bare thread of sound, feeling the lightest touch of his fingers, brushing the tears from her face.

She knows it is the last time he will ever touch her.

Fleeing before she can truly break, and regret everything she’s said, she pauses in the doorway, and turns to look at him; a last, long sight. “Jon,” she says, trying to imprint the image on her memory, the way he looks at her so openly, so starving with barely restrained need, “being with you could never ruin me.”

_But it has,_ she thinks as she feels, the halls before her blurred with tears. _Oh, it has._

_

Robb and Peter return the next day, full of good cheer and tales of exploits along the coast; neither seem to notice how thin she is, how quiet Jon is, slipping into the shadows.

She marries Robb a week later, in the Godswood before Riverrun’s slender heart tree, Peter’s golden lion shield propped up at its foot.

Her tongue trips over the unfamiliar phrases, and her silver gown with its delicate embroidery representing all the good Beasts of Narnia hangs on her frame, but the people of Riverrun praise her pale beauty, and the Animals of the Narnian company dance around their feet cheering when the ceremony is finished, the imprint of Robb’s kiss still on her lips.

Jon is a dark presence against the back wall of the Godswood and retreats among the crowds of men at the lower tables in the great hall when the feast is laid out, where his stark black is harder for her eye to pick out amidst the Northerners’ affection for the dull colors of earth and stone.

Robb praises her beauty, and takes her silences and pained smiles as a bride’s nerves; he presses the finest delicacies on her in an effort to please her so that her heart aches, and her stomach sours.

On her other side, Catelyn presses wine into her hand, leaning over to say quietly, for Susan’s ears only, “Drink, and it will go easier. I remember my wedding night here as a war bride, and how shy I was.”

Susan does not know how to tell her otherwise; to tell her that shyness and nerves are not what plague her, but guilt. Guilt when she looks at Robb, sweet and smiling; guilt when she catches the glitter of Jon’s eyes, as he stares at them like a phantom from the lower hall, drinking steadily.

So she drinks as well, and finds herself pleasantly muddled with lack of food and too much wine by the time Robb escorts her upstairs, by the time she is stripped and settled into bed, hair loose like a shining black river, awaiting her husband.

It isn’t until Fergus bows himself out, door closing behind him, that she feels the squeeze of fear on her heart; she has not slept a night without him since she was fourteen years old. The watchful gaze of Robb’s direwolf, Grey Wind, from the hearth is no comfort; he has smelled Ghost on her, knows that she belongs to his brother, even if his master does not.

The fear rises when Robb climbs into the bed with her, but it needn’t have; he is a careful lover, gentle and kind, and does not remark on her closed eyes, or the tears that fall from them.

With her eyes closed, she finds she can pretend, so long as he keeps silent - his hair is too short when she runs her hands through it, but otherwise they are similar enough in the darkness, her husband and his brother.

Even so, she curls in on herself afterwards, Robb asleep in the great bed beside her, and the wine roils in her belly, leaving her feeling sick, wrung out and wrong.

_

There is no honeymoon for them; no sweet halcyon time for them to grow to know one another, and become companions, for the war rages on. In her heart, Susan does not lament this, and that lack makes it all the worse somehow, leaves her feeling like the worst possible wife.

In the south, the old King’s brother Stannis has been defeated and killed, leaving the Lannisters still firmly in possession of both the throne and their lives.

Robb lays out his plans to move on King’s Landing, frowning at the maps in their chambers late at night, long after his war councils have broken up.

“We need a distraction,” he says, pushing away from the table with a frustrated sigh. “I can move against Tywin with all the force I have, but as long as he’s holed up there in King’s Landing, what good will it do me? I could take Casterly Rock itself from him and he wouldn’t budge. He’s too clever for that.” Susan sits in their cold bed, watching him as he paces the floor. She takes little part in council, being only interested in the movements of the Narnians; she is Queen of two kingdoms now already, and has no desire to add six more.

Then again, neither does Robb. “If we could only get one of the other great houses on our side - the Tyrells, or the Martells, we could manage to win the throne. Though Gods know what I’d do with it then.”

It strikes her in a flash, a bit of knowledge gained from a small boy. “What about the dragon queen?”

“The dragon queen?” Robb thinks for a moment, then laughs, and walks over to seize her face, kissing her soundly, though when he pulls back, his face has sobered. Try as she might, her reluctance to his kisses can’t be mistaken. “It just might work, my lady.”

“Send Edmund,” she suggests, ignoring his hurt look, the cooled tone of his voice. “He can be...shockingly persuasive, when he puts his mind to it.”

When the plans are laid out the next morning, it is as she suggested; Robb and Peter will move south, and harry the Lannister forces, keeping them penned in the city and cutting them off from supplies and allies both. Catelyn will travel to the coast, and sail the long way around the south of Westeros, to attempt an alliance with the people of Dorne. And Ed - Ed will travel to White Harbor, and there take ship for Essos, and Daenerys, the dragon queen, to make an alliance and offer her their support in her quest for the Iron Throne, in exchange for the North’s continued independence.

“I have every confidence in you, Ed,” she says loftily, feeling almost her old self when he gives her his familiar, boyish grin.

“A woman who hatches dragons and calls herself their mother? She sounds positively Narnian to me,” he says, brimming with confidence. “The next time you see me, I’ll be mounted on dragonback, winging above the clouds.”

She rolls her eyes, but with affection; she has always trusted Edmund implicitly in everything, their bond a tight one. Her smile dies on her lips, though, when she notices Jon across the room, hollow eyed and gaunt in the corner, avoiding everyone, even the brother she knows he adores.

“Jon,” Robb says, “I’m giving you command of part of the Northmen-”

“No,” Jon says, quiet but abrupt. “I don’t want it. I’m going back to the Wall. The Others are still out there, and winter is coming.”

“If you’d let me finish, brother,” Robb says, patiently, “I’m giving you these men to take back to Winterfell with you, to prepare for any trouble from beyond the Wall.”

“Oh,” Jon says, voice stiff, finally meeting his brother’s eyes. “Thank you, my lord.”

Robb nods, though Susan suspects he’s resisting the urge to roll his eyes at his brother as well. This much she’s learned about her husband - how uncomfortable he is with his newfound titles, how he still feels the need to look around for his father at the words _my lord_.

“And you, my lady wife,” he says, turning to her, those words still seeming clumsy and unfamiliar, grating to her ears. “You will go to Winterfell as well. We’ve left Bran there on his own too long.”

Her heart drops like a stone in her chest, and she keeps her eyes on Robb with an effort of will, steeling herself against the wild, horrified desire to look to Jon. “But, I thought - I thought I might remain here, or travel with Lady Catelyn to Dorne,” she says, desperate. “I am at my most useful when negotiating.”

“Or when ruling,” Robb points out. “My lord uncle needs no help in Riverrun, nor my mother in Dorne, but Bran is still a child, and Jon can’t rule the North and prepare for an invasion at the Wall at the same time. I need you to do this for me, and for the North,” he says, and she knows from his tone that the conversation is finished, the decision made.

“Very well, my lord,” she says, eyes downcast, trying to repress her flare of fury at being treated like his subject; this is, after all, his country, not hers. “But, if I may,” she says, turning to her brothers, trying to salvage something of the situation, “I should take a portion of the Narnians with me. Ed won’t need his troops, not on a diplomatic mission, and he would need more ships than is practical to transport them anyhow. Surely they will be more useful in the North.”

“Agreed,” Edmund says instantly, watching her with careful eyes, and she dares Robb with a look to challenge her on this, her brows lifting slightly.

Wisely, he does not, acquiescing with a nod, and Peter says, “We will have more than enough to hold a siege in the south without them. Their command is yours, sister.”

She dares not look at Jon as they leave the room; dares not to think of the long months ahead, though her treacherous body tingles, flushed hot with remembered touch.

_

On their last night together, she lies curled away from Robb, her face to the fire and the great grey direwolf who has still not warmed to her, laying at the hearth.

“No,” she says, when he kisses her neck and pulls gently at her shoulder, seeking to turn her onto her back; instead she shifts until her back is flush against his chest, throwing her top leg over his to allow him access, her face veiled by the dark curtain of her hair.

It is easier this way, she thinks, as he moves against her, breath hot in her ear. Easier when he is invisible to her; when he could be anyone.

Grey Wind watches her, and she stares back at him stone-faced, dry-eyed and unblinking.

_

In the morning, they go their separate ways; Catelyn to meet the Greyjoy fleet along the west coast, while the rest take the road east, towards the Kingsroad and their ultimate parting.

At the crossroads, some days later, Susan makes her farewells; to Peter with her customary exuberance, embraces, and admonitions, and to Robb more decorously, though he laughs with mock indignation.

“Only one kiss for me, and no wild embrace?” he asks; his smile seems genuine enough, and he did, after all, grow up teasing sisters of his own. Still, her instincts are sharp, sharp enough to detect the seed of real hurt beneath the words, a hurt she knows he has done nothing to deserve. Nothing but marry a woman in love with another man, all unknowing; nothing but been betrayed by two people who should have loved him most, she thinks.

Maybe that’s why she kisses him again, doing her best to apologize with lips and tongue, and a lack of words.

“Much better,” he says, sounding a trifle breathless, when they part. Sliding a hand down to rest over her flat stomach, he says, “Maybe when I return you’ll present me with a little prince,” hastily amending, “or princess,” at the look on her face.

Susan summons up all her poise and gives him her most charming smile, willing him to believe it is merely her womanly scruples that have been offended, and not the core of her being, horrified at the unexpected thought of carrying his child.

_Don’t be so foolish,_ she chides herself. _You know perfectly well the consequences of sharing a man’s bed._ Of course she does; when she had bled while in her sickbed, only weeks before the wedding, some small, feverish part of her had sorrowed that she did not carry Jon’s child. Yet her mind has blocked the thought that Robb’s may have taken hold instead.

“May He keep you in His Light,” she says, offering the same formal Narnian blessing she had Peter, and removes his hand from her body by the simple expedient of clasping it in her own and raising it to her mouth, kissing his knuckles.

He brushes them along the side of her face, and with a quick, “Gods willing, I’ll see you again soon,” he is gone.

When she turns, Edmund is watching, and helps her to mount with a sympathetic look she hardly feels deserving of, though he keeps his own counsel.

Jon is already mounted, his back to her; stiff and unbowed, a column of black, brittle iron in the saddle, with his eyes fixed on the horizon.

She bleeds before they reach the Twins, and nearly weeps with joy; joy twined, as all in her life seems to be, with a quiet, sick guilt.

_

They find the Twins in chaos following the death of old Lord Frey (choked on a meat pie while laughing at a fight between two of his many sons); predictably, his brood now fights for the scraps, and they are all glad to move on as quickly as possible.

“Thank the Lion we are a happier family than _that_,” Edmund says as they leave the squabbling and iminent bloodshed behind them; Susan looks at Jon, still riding stoic and nearly silent at their side, and says nothing.

_

Jon unbends as they travel through the shifting marshes of the Neck; enough, anyhow, to talk quietly with Edmund in the evenings, their feet warming by the fire, speaking with ease of everything from the finer points of swordplay to the trials of being a younger brother, and the agonies of living with sisters.

She makes no attempt to join, knowing she is unwanted. Instead she stays tucked behind the walls of her tent, lying with her head near the flaps, listening and drinking in every word in secret, pretending they are all for her.

_

The night they reach the ends of the marshes, a meandering offshoot twisting from the Kingsroad off east, to the great port of White Harbor, Edmund ducks into her tent.

“I won’t presume to tell you how to live your life-” he starts.

“Good.”

“But do be careful, Su.” His eyes, when she dares meet them, are full of sympathy, his expression gentle, not the judgement she had feared.

“Am I that obvious, then?” she says, mouth twisting downwards.

“No - or at least, I don’t think so. Not to someone who didn’t know you as well as I do, and who hasn’t seen what I’ve seen.”

“I can’t help it,” she whispers, and in the silence, the sounds of the camp outside seem loud, the fires crackling, horses snuffling and shifting. “I wanted to be a good wife to Robb, truly I did. But every time he touched me, I just felt...sick. Wrong.”

Her little brother takes her hand and squeezes, and she wonders when he had managed to grow up so much, how it always seemed to happen behind her back, somehow. “I never envied you and Peter that, you know. That you’d have to make diplomatic marriages, and never be free.”

“I hope Peter’s will be easier,” she says, thinking of the sweet, pretty, proper lady Robb and Jon describe the older of their sisters as. _I hope she knows how to be a better wife to a stranger than I’ve been._ “Do you think he hates me now?” she asks Edmund. “Jon, I mean. He never speaks to me, or even glances in my direction.”

Edmund smiles at her, ruefully. “Sometimes we purposely avoid what we want most, when we know the wanting will only hurt us,” he says. “You know how to read people better than that, Su.”

“Everyone but him,” she says, and sighs.

“It will get easier - maybe when you have children,” Ed suggests, seeming doubtful.

“I’d rather die,” she snaps, too loud, her body shuddering violently at the thought. “I can’t, I just can’t.”

“Do you dislike Robb so much, then?”

“It isn’t dislike of him!” she cries, miserable. “It’s...oh, I don’t know. Misguided fidelity. I gave my loyalty to the wrong man, and now it’s hopeless.”

“Oh, Su,” Ed sighs, and she thinks he would try to hold her, if not for the subtle shake of her head; if he did, she knows she would break. “My advice is to let him leave for this Wall of his if he wants, and do not follow him. The sooner the two of you are apart, the better for you both.”

She knows he’s right; has known it since Riverrun; since the voyage over the ocean; since Narnia. But the truth stings none the less for its rightness.

“I will be careful,” she promises him; that much, at least, she can give. She is always careful.

“Very well,” he says, eyeing her. He knows her well enough to know it is all she’s willing to give, and no more, and he turns to leave, the firelight catching his face as he lifts the tent flap, revealing a shadow over his jaw.

“Edmund,” she says, suspicious. “When did you begin to grow a beard?”

He strokes his chin, grinning. “It seems to be all the fashion here in Westeros. Do you suppose the dragon queen will like it?” He winks, and then he’s gone.

When the sun rises, they part ways, and she and Jon continue on the road to Winterfell, the pair of them riding side by side, each utterly alone, at the head of their armies.

By the time they arrive at Winterfell, he has still not spoken a word to her.

_

Bran seems happy to see them when they arrive, though his steward, looking at the amount of men and Beasts pouring into the courtyards, does not.

“Don’t worry,” Jon says to him, standing from where he had crouched to hug Bran in his little wheeled chair, “I won’t be staying long, and my men go with me, for the most part. I’ll leave a small force here to help garrison the castle. The rest march to the Wall.”

“But you can’t go back to the Wall,” Bran says; already he sounds older than the last time she saw him, though it’s been only months. Soon, she thinks, his voice will begin to crack. “They’ll execute you for deserting.”

Jon brushes his concern aside, but it wears on her, a new fear for the growing pit of anxiety that lives in her belly to gnaw on.

She runs Jon to ground near twilight in the Godswood, standing before the silent, black pool. Red sap runs down the bone-white bark of the tree, dripping from the sightless, carved face, and Susan shivers. The spirits that live in this place are not like the dryads back home, and she does not think they like her.

“Is it true, what Bran said?” she demands of him without preamble. She already fears he won’t speak to her at all; even less so if she attempts to be polite. “I spoke with the Maester, and with Ser Cassel, and a few others. They all agreed that the Night’s Watch is utterly inflexible in their rules, and not known for forgiveness.”

“Maybe,” Jon says, his gaze all for the tree, for the gods of his forefathers, and none for her. He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not important.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she protests, taken with the urge to grab his shoulders, to spin him around and shake him until he listens. “Without you, who will fight this war? You’re the only one who believes in it.”

“You believe in it,” he says, softly, still to the great, silent Weirwood.

She feels a small glow of something deep inside; maybe satisfaction. She dare not name it _hope_, and ruthlessly shoves it down. “Yes. But your men won’t follow me. The men of the Night’s Watch won’t listen to me.”

“You’re their Queen.”

“A foreign Queen, who talks to animals and is haughty and half mad, thinking she can command armies,” she says. “I am not deaf, Jon, nor are my Birds and Beasts. I know what is said of me.”

“Some of the houses would follow your command,” he says. “The Mormonts for certain, and Wyman Manderley, most likely. But not many others,” he admits. “The Northmen are proud, and stubborn,” he says, finally looking at her. “I don’t know that they like following a bastard, either.”

“They follow Ned Stark’s son,” she snorts, and the red, red leaves of the Weirwood tree shiver on their branches. “I may not be of the North, but I know that much. They respect your father here even though he’s gone.”

“They should,” he says. “My father was a great man, good and noble. He always did the right thing, and never doubted.”

“And yet, he had you,” she points out, softly, for it hardly seems fair to her that Jon should castigate himself so over the same sin his father had committed, or near enough. “You’re a great man too.”

“I’m not,” he says, shaking his head so that the bun he’s taken to wearing his hair in loosens, stray curls escaping.

“Jon,” she says, daring to step closer, hardly knowing what she can say, only knowing that if she doesn’t say something, here and now, their relationship will truly be broken, irreparable. If she fails to convince him now, he will die. “Please, don’t do this. At least send letters, see what their response is. If we frame it as orders from Robb-”

“Don’t say his name,” Jon breaks in, tipping his head back to the sky, eyes closed. “Please. I can’t bear it.”

“Would you rather I call him _my husband_?” she asks, bitterness welling up on her tongue. “You know I didn’t want to marry him. You must know how it feels for me, seeing you day after day and knowing that I can never - that we can never…” She trails off, her words swallowed by the black pool, and is taken aback when he turns on her with a look so fierce her heart jumps in her chest, pulse fluttering wildly in her neck, desire mingled with a tiny hint of fear.

“How do you think it makes _me_ feel, Susan? All my life, I’ve watched Robb have what I never will, and not once did I hate him for it. Not until now.” He crosses the distance between them in two strides, grabbing her by the upper arms, roughly. “Now, I have to watch him sit beside you, and touch you, kiss you. I have to watch him hope he’s a put a child inside you. And every time I see the two of you together, I hate him. My own brother.”

“At least you do not have to lie with him,” she hisses, pulling herself from his grasp.

“No,” he says, shooting her a dark look. “I’ve been loyal, at least.”

She gasps, loud in the silent grove. “That is unfair. I can hardly refuse him.”

“Every night, when I close my eyes, that’s all I can see, all I can think about. You, lying in his bed, doing with him what you did with me.”

“And every time we did, I thought of you,” she says, and he looks like he might be sick. “I pretended he was you, so I could- so I could manage it,” she finishes. “Is that what you wanted to hear? What this has cost me?”

“No,” he says, and steps back, turning away. “Gods, what have we done?”

She clings to the one thing that makes any difference, in her mind. “We didn’t mean to. We didn’t set out to hurt anyone, and we haven’t. No one except ourselves.”

“Look where it’s gotten us,” he says, with a mirthless laugh. “I never wanted a wife, and now…” he shakes his head. “Now you’re in my head, and I can’t get you out.”

“Only in your head?” she asks, softly. He does not respond, only sighs. “Please,” she says, moving to him slowly, the way she would a started Deer ready to take flight, laying a hand on his shoulder; lightly, so lightly. “Don’t go to the Wall. I forbid you to die.”

He shrugs her hand off, but gently, taking it in his own. “You said you’d never ask me for anything again,” he reminds her, holding her hand in his, palm up, stroking its lines with his fingers until she closes her eyes, shivers. “I won’t go,” he says, folding her hand in on itself, letting go. “Not yet. But I can’t stay here forever, Susan.”

“I know,” she whispers, clutching her closed hand to her heart as though it’s been scalded.

They both know if he stays, it is not a matter of _if_ they will be tempted to betray Robb again, but _when_.

_

Bran becomes their chaperone, though he doesn’t know it, pleased enough with the attention lavished on him whenever one of them wants to see the other; as he’s pushed through the castle and over the grounds, he points out to Susan all his favorite places, most of them involving dizzying heights.

Much of the rest of her time, she spends with Maester Luwin, for he was also once an outsider here, and pleased to aid her in any way he can.

He shares the response from the Night’s Watch with her first, while she strokes the head of the raven it flew in on; these ravens may not speak with as large a vocabulary as her own friends, but she loves them even so, even as this one _quorks_ at her, cocking its head in hopes of a treat.

The note is not encouraging, as they had feared, promising punishment and death to all traitors to the Watch. At the end, a smaller note is added in a different hand: _Please don’t come back, Jon._ Jon smiles sadly when he sees it, touching the paper and murmuring, “Sam,” before putting it to the flame.

She watches Jon, brooding day after day with little to do; watches the soldiers grow bored, and pick fights with her Beasts; sends her own notes to the Watch, trying to strike a balance between imperious and persuasive, and gets brusque answers, when she gets any at all.

Finally, she makes a decision.

“We will all go,” she says. “Long enough to see what the situation is, at least. They dare not kill you if I’m there as well, not openly, at least.”

“How will you prevent it, Your Grace?” Maester Luwin asks, frowning. “The Watch obeys neither King nor Queen.”

“I will _command_ it,” she says, firmly, and then smiles. “Besides, I’ve yet to see the man who can stand up to a legion of Wolves, Bears, Leopards, and Griffons, not to mention their Queen, without quailing.”

Behind her, Fergus growls, and Ghost’s eyes gleam in the shadows, the rich shade of blood.

_

The Wall is immense, improbably large, towering over the snow-coated landscape so that it takes Susan’s breath away. She knows, in that instant, that all Jon has said is true, really absolutely true; for why else would anyone build such a terrifyingly high wall, if not to keep out monsters?

The Watch gives them a cold welcome, and only Jon’s small group of friends will speak to them with any warmth; it is from them that they discover the truth, the mass of wildlings who sit encamped on the far side of the Wall, who claim to want only passage through to the other side.

That night, she and Jon sit, Fergus and Ghost at their sides, and speak with Sam in a barren, cold little room set against the Wall itself.

“They’ll become fodder for the army of the dead if we don’t get them through,” Jon says, and the chill in her bones has nothing to do with the sheet of ice mere feet away.

The next day, she demands passage through the Wall for herself and Jon, and watching the look in her eyes, the men agree, though she half expects they will lock the gate shut behind them.

The wildlings' leader, Mance Rayder, laughs when she calls herself a Queen, eyes her appreciatively, and refuses to kneel.

“I did not ask you to, sir,” she responds, mildly, and from that moment, they understand one another.

When she and Jon return to the Wall, they return with new information, and a renewed sense of urgency; even Susan’s human senses pick up the smell from the dark forests that stretch out beyond the Wall; frost, and death, and something colder and more evil she has not smelled since she was a child.

Fergus shudders when they pass back through the great tunnel underneath the Wall, and flatly refuses to go beyond again.

“You will let the wildlings through the Wall,” she says, the next day, to the man who leads at Castle Black, one Ser Alliser Thorne. He is a vicious bully of a man, but Susan has seen his type before, and refuses to be cowed.

“Why should I want to do a great fool thing like that?” he says. “They’re savages and cannibals, and would eat your pretty face as soon as look at it. I’ll not break my vows for the likes of them, no.”

“Your vows are to _shield the realms of men_,” Susan points out, clenching her fists beneath the heavy fur of her cloak. “Are they not men, Ser?”

“No more so than your beasts,” he grumbles, eyeing Fergus with dislike, the great towering Bears lined up behind her, the Griffons preening their feathers with sharp beaks.

“Besides,” she says, tamping down the hot flare of rage in her chest, her hatred of this pathetic little man, keeping her tone even and smooth, “I am doing you a favor, offering to take them off your hands. They say they have a horn that can bring down your Wall; turn them over to me, and I will settle them in the North, and you may wash your hands of the whole affair.”

“They’ll be your responsibility,” he says. "And it'll be your problem, explaining your foolishness to your Kingly husband." 

"My husband is none of your concern, Ser. But I believe that I and my _beasts_ are." She watches with detached interest as his face begins to take on an interesting hue, turning from red to near purple, for he knows he cannot defy her. The veiled threat in the strength of her army is too great, and while a Westrosi-born Queen might have been bound by tradition not to interfere with the Watch, Susan is not.

She wins in the end, of course. The wildlings file through the Wall calmly enough, their garments rimed with frost, bringing the smell of cold death with them.

When they depart, Jon turns back to Sam. “When the dead come,” he says, “send a raven at once. And ride south yourself.” Susan shivers as she watches Jon stare up at the Wall, seeing fear clearly etched on his face for the first time. “Ride south, and don’t look back.”

_

Settling the wildlings takes up much of their time; Jon is often away from Winterfell for weeks at a time, riding between settlements, conferring with Mance, doing his best to integrate an entire people to new ways of life.

Susan’s lot is no less demanding; it is her part to ride from keep to keep, doing her best to soothe and persuade the Northern lords and their families that they are not in imminent danger of being murdered in their beds.

“You seem happy,” she says to Jon, on one of the rare occasions their paths cross and meet in Winterfell, and indeed, he is no longer gaunt, with dark circles beneath his eyes; instead, he reminds her of the Jon she first met, back in Narnia, so long ago.

“I like the wildlings,” he admits. “There’s something - I don’t know. Something honest about them. They don’t care where a man comes from, only what he can do.” She smiles, watching the fond look on his face, hearing the affection in his voice. “They remind me a little of you,” he says, and her breath catches. “There’s nothing false about them.”

This makes her laugh. Many people who have met her would say there is nothing _but_ artifice to her, only a hollow facade, a mask of gentility that hides a false heart. But not him; when Jon looks at her, his eyes are clear. “Thank you,” she says, putting a hand on his. “I take that as a great compliment.”

He looks down at the table, at where their hands meet, but he does not pull away, and her heart exults.

_

The next time she returns to Winterfell, she finds Jon riding up the road behind her, Ghost at his side, and though she casts them a suspicious look, neither of them speak of coincidences in timing.

In the keep, she finds Maester Luwin looking harassed, and when he wordlessly points upwards, she sees the source of his frustrations: a young Crow, delightedly throwing himself down the snowy slope of a roof, over and over, _caw-_ing with glee as he rolls.

“I believe that _creature_ has a message for you,” he says, with an air of wounded dignity. “And if you could ask him to return my cloak pin, it would be most appreciated.”

“I apologize, Maester,” Susan says, biting her lips to keep from laughing. “Crows are terrible little thieves of anything that gleams, though they are _supposed to know better._” This last she pitches to be heard by the tumbling bird; Plum, she believes, squinting up at him, so named for the slightly purple sheen of his feathers.

Plum flutters down immediately as Maester Luwin stalks off, hopping and bobbing around her in his version of a bow. “Greetings, Your Majesty,” he says, in his gravely, hoarse little voice. “Sorry about that chap, I am, but he’s a mean one, he is! Keeping ravens in cages up there in that tower of his. _And_ he’s never offered us a shiny! Most unwelcoming, I say. His bloody pin ain’t even _that_ shiny. Don’t believe he’s polished it up a once.”

She sees the baffled look on Jon’s face, and can’t help but break out into laughter; Crows can be quite a lot for a person to get used to.

“Who’s this one, then?” Plum says impertinently, fluttering up to perch on her proffered arm, staring at Jon with first one eye, then the other. “Has _he_ got a shiny for us?”

“Message first,” Susan reminds him, severely.

“Ah, yes, about that.” The bird takes a deep breath, uttering the Crow-version of a cough as he thinks. “Your brother his Majesty King Edmund would like us to report to you that he’s secured a most favorable alliance with Her Majesty Queen Daenerys, Mother of Dragons, Queen of...erm...some foreign place, and so on.” He looks at her apologetically. “Got an awful lot of titles, that one, Majesty. Couldn’t quite keep track of them all.”

Jon rolls his eyes, and Susan suppresses the urge to laugh at them both. “That’s quite all right, Plum. Is Edmund on his way back, then?”

“Aye, Majesty. He says they’re heading for that big red city in the south, there to win a glorious victory and return home to you with all speed.” Birds, of course, cannot roll their eyes; still, Susan recognizes the urge as Plum parrots Edmund’s pompous phrasing. Her brother never did get over the urge to tease his messengers, she reflects. “He sent you a personal message too, he did. Not too sure I got the right of that one though,” Plum says, doubtfully. 

“What was it?” she asks.

“Just this, Majesty: The beard worked.”

Neither Jon nor Plum understand her resulting fit of laughter.

_

She does not leave Winterfell again, and to her surprise, Jon stays in its confines as well.

Time is running out for them, and they both know it; the hours bleeding into days into a week, every one of them drawing their brothers’ victory closer, and with it their return.

For there can be no doubt of their victory now, not when Plum describes Queen Daenerys with relish, her armies and her three half-grown dragons, already more than fully capable of burning men and reducing cities to ash. Susan only hopes Edmund knows what he’s gotten himself into.

She and Jon sit together often, in the great hall, in the solar, before the heart tree in the Godswood. A comfortable silence grows between them, companionable enough for all that it sits, heavy and pregnant, with all that neither of them can say.

“What will we do, when he comes home?” she says one night, lying on her back in the gardens of Winterfell’s great, silent greenhouses, deserted at this late hour but for the two of them, the winter rose bushes rising above them in full, blue bloom.

“I’ll go,” Jon says, sitting beside her. His arms rest on his drawn up knees, and he looks pensive, but not sad; not that look she hates, full of regret and hatred for himself. “I’ll go to live among the wildlings, and prepare them for the war to come. I can’t stay here with you both.”

“I know,” she says, watching his face in the moonlight, so dear to her that she aches with the effort of holding back her touch. She cannot imagine being under the same roof as both Jon and her husband again, not even one large as Winterfell. _It would be unfair to us all_, she thinks. _Sweet Lion, help me learn to let go before it breaks me._ “Would you do one thing for me?” she asks, and he tips his head to the side, considering, before giving her a solemn nod. “Take your hair out of that ridiculous bun,” she says, and delights in his resulting laughter.

“Does it bother you so much, then?” he asks, moving to shake his hair free, running his hands through the curls until they spring up in a glorious riot around his face. “I had no idea you disliked it.”

“I always find you handsome,” she says, sitting up, brushing an errant curl into place. “But I do like you better this way. You look more Narnian.” He smiles at her, tender, sweet, and her fingers move of their own accord, touching his lips, feeling his mouth curve beneath them. “I love you, Jon Snow,” she says, softly, trembling as he cups her cheek. “I will until I die.”

“And I you,” he says, his thumb brushing over her lips.

He leaves her then, for his will is stronger than hers; hers which wants to run riot, wants to sink naked into the flowerbeds with him, wants to tell him, _We should have died in that tower_.

_

The next night, the dragon comes.

It lands in the courtyard, a great black beast with wings that glow reddish in the torchlight; Susan, roused from her bed and running out into the cold with a heavy fur cloak hastily thrown over her nightclothes, stops for a moment to take in the sheer majesty of the thing, a creature even she has not seen before.

The woman who slides from its back is tiny, neat, and exquisite, though Susan barely notices; behind her is Edmund, an Edmund whose face is coated in soot and blood, trickling from a dirty bandage around his head. An Edmund who looks indescribably weary, and cut to the core.

“Susan…” he says, grasping her by the arm and swaying as she struggles to hold him upright. He glances behind her, and she does not need to turn to know that Jon has joined them, his steady presence still not enough to counter the panic rising up her throat along with the sour bile.

“Peter?” she asks, forcing the word past numbed lips.

Edmund shakes his head. “He’s fine. It’s Robb...Susan, I’m sorry. He’s gone.”

Behind her, she hears the swift intake of Jon’s breath, the pain in his shocked, “No!”

She stares at Edmund, uncomprehending; at the sympathy etched on the face of the dragon queen; at Jon, when she turns, his features slack.

_I made this happen,_ she thinks, her mind a whirl, and walks away without a word, leaving them all behind.

_

She cannot grieve for Robb, not truly, and that makes it all the worse.

Daenerys, now Queen of the Six Kingdoms (for the Lannisters are all dead and defeated as well, and no other claimants remain to challenge her) comes to sit beside her as Susan lays in her bed, dry eyed and sleepless, staring at the wall, and tells her gently of Robb’s bravery, how he himself had cut down Joffrey, his father’s murderer, before falling to a huge knight they called the Mountain.

“I took pleasure in burning that one,” Daenerys says, her voice grim. “I did not know your husband long, but I’m sorry for his loss. I know what it is to lose a husband.” Her voice softens, sounding a world away. “I don’t think the pain ever stops, not really. But it does grow less.”

Susan laughs at this, great silent suppressed waves that choke her until they turn to hiccuping sobs, and lets Daenerys hold her like the sister she craves, though even Lucy’s cordial would have no hope of curing her now.

It fails to matter much to her; she does not deserve hope.

_

She creeps, one night when the rest of Winterfell sleeps, to Jon’s chamber, silent, wraith-like in the thin linen of her nightdress, made light and fine for a new bride.

He did not come to her, in her isolation. She did not expect him to; she knows Jon (_better than she ever knew Robb_), knows the ways he takes guilt and grief and responsibility and wraps himself in them like furs.

He says nothing when she slips in the door, though he’s sitting awake, staring at the fire, a pitcher of wine half drunk at his side.

He says nothing still when she comes to stand before him, the fire hot on her back, goosebumps rising on her bare arms. He only looks at her, expressionless, and drinks.

“I’m sorry,” she says, the words horribly inadequate. “I know he meant more to you- I just...I’m so sorry,” she repeats, though she knows the words mean nothing, can never convey how horrified she is for him. She grieves little enough for Robb himself, but for Jon, her heart breaks.

“I killed him,” he says, voice sounding too loud, breaking the stillness. “I didn’t want him to die, but I wanted what he had, gods help me.” The look on his face brings tears to Susan’s eyes as he stares up at her, all the grief and rage tangled up, twisting his features. “What if they heard me? What if this is their way of answering?”

“Jon…” she says softly. How can she possibly reassure him, when it’s what her heart has told her, all those days lying in the bed she was to have shared with Robb? There can be no absolution for them, that much she knows. Still, she has to try. “That isn’t how gods work.”

“Isn’t it?” he says bitterly, not meeting her eyes. “The gods of my ancestors are not a friendly lion, Susan.”

“He isn’t friendly,” she shoots back; only one who has never seen the face of Aslan could call him that. “Not at all. But he isn’t vengeful either.” _Why should I punish you, child,_ she can almost hear him saying, _when you punish yourself so much more harshly than I ever could?_

“But you’re in Westeros now,” Jon says, his voice soft, staring up at her outlined in the firelight, something new kindled in his eyes; suddenly she remembers how thin her gown is, how transparent the fire makes it, and a fine tremor runs through her limbs. “Maybe your god has no power here.” When he stands, he looms over her, the shadow cast by the fire rising behind him, giving him more height. “Why did you come here, Susan?”

“I wanted to see you,” she says, wishing she could back away. There’s something dangerous in his eyes, something dark put there by grief and wine and brooding.

“You shouldn’t have.” When he grabs her arms, his hands are rough, their grip strong enough to leave bruises, and his mouth comes down on hers hard, hot and heavy.

_No,_ she thinks, even as her treacherous feet fumble, leading them towards the tumbled expanse of his bed, _no, this is all wrong, it can’t be like this_.

Her nightdress tears as he pushes her back onto the bed, the sound of ripping fabric rending the silence, and he pauses only long enough to free his cock before pushing into her.

As she gasps and arches away from the unexpected pain, she understands suddenly what he’s doing, understands the punishment he intends this to be for them both.

_Let it be what we deserve, then_, she thinks, and kisses him urgently, biting down on his lower lip, hard enough to hurt. Tearing his shirt from him, she rakes her fingernails down his back, across his chest until he looks as though a lion has clawed him.

He grabs a fistful of her loose hair and yanks, hard enough to pull her head back, and bites down at the exposed place where neck meets shoulder. _Like a wolf_, she thinks, and shudders in her climax, biting back a cry.

He follows a moment later, pulling out of her and spending himself into the sheets; at least, she thinks, he doesn’t mean to punish them with that particular consequence.

She leaves him then, sliding out of his bed and from underneath him without a word, pausing only to catch up his cloak as she passes, to cover her ruined nightdress on her way back to her own chambers.

He does not ask her to stay, and she does not want him to.

_

They do it again, in the days and weeks that follow; again, and again, slipping secretly into one another’s rooms at night, until their frantic coupling leaves them both marked, bruised and aching beneath their clothes.

They do not speak, ever, and each encounter leaves Susan feeling ill, even as she trembles with anticipation in the dark.

_Oh Lord, punish me again,_ she thinks, when his hands are on her body; after, she lies in the dark and lets the guilt wash over her, welcoming its bitter ache.

_

“This is what we wanted, isn’t it?” Jon says to her one night, breaking their silence, as he slams his hips into hers, making her whimper with every thrust.

“Yes,” she says on a sob, the pain mingling with pleasure until she can’t separate the two, until they are one inside her body, just as they are in her mind.

“Hurt me,” Jon begs, a hiss in her ear, and she obliges.

_

In the daylight hours, time spins on, and gradually, life returns to Winterfell; even something that might be called happiness.

Jon’s skinny little sister Arya returns home first, out of nowhere, with a group of ragged men and boys at her back, her hair chopped short and a slender sword clutched in her fist, and tells them a tale of horrific adventure and narrow escapes so nonchalantly that it freezes Susan’s blood.

Peter arrives next, with the Narnians, Northmen, and Catelyn Stark in tow, and Susan weeps to see him standing there in the courtyard, so strong and golden and alive. “I don’t think I believed you were really alive,” she says, not cringing from his tight embrace even when his hands dig into old bruises and new, raw scrapes.

“I’ll always come back to you, Su,” he says, mildly, as if she should have _known_ that, and she’s missed that too, that air of utter assurance that Peter carries with him, whenever it suits him.

“Susan,” he says, turning away for a moment, “this is my wife, Sansa.”

The girls he presents to her is tall, nearly as tall as he, and pretty, her red hair shining in the sun as she smiles, though her eyes have a hollow look about them.

_Of course,_ Susan remembers. _She is Robb’s sister, and likely loved him far better than I ever would have_.

She wonders, as she hugs Sansa, what kind of grief this girl would feel if Peter were to die, and the bitter knife twists itself further inside her.

_

They inter Robb’s bones in the crypt, beside his father’s.

Susan watches the Stark women from the corner of her eye; watches Catelyn weep with quiet dignity, watches Sansa openly sob, watches Arya sniffle, and feels like an outsider, like the worst kind of imposter.

The direwolf statue stares at her, coldly; Grey Wind had died with his master, and his bones now rest here too.

_Even in death, he judges me_, Susan thinks.

At her side, Jon is silent, and remains behind, long after the rest of them file up under the open sky.

_

When Daenerys returns, with three dragons and legions of ordered soldiers, marching in formation, it is not a moment too soon; she has barely been there a full day before the raven comes from the north, Sam’s shaky hand spelling out an unmistakable message: _They are coming._

Peter protests when she gets her armor out, wanting her to stay behind and lead the garrison at Winterfell in case the worst should come to pass, but Edmund takes one look at her face and puts a restraining hand on his brother’s arm, shaking his head.

“You’re coming with us?” Daenerys asks with surprise, when she comes out in the courtyard, armored, with her bow slung on her back. Susan supposes she is used to being the only woman amid armies of men, and feels a twinge of sympathy for this strange, beautiful, lonely queen.

“I made a vow,” Susan says, checking the obsidian-tipped arrows in her quiver. “It’s what I came here to do.”

Daenerys says nothing, but gives her a nod of approval, one Queen to another.

_

They camp, for the last night, in the shadow of the Wall, the air colder than ever, making her bones ache and her breath freeze in her lungs.

“You should have gone home,” Jon says, coming up beside her where she stands still in the frigid air, watching the dragons wheel overhead, blotting out the stars. “There’s nothing to keep you here anymore.”

She looks at him, his hair blowing in the breeze, curls unrestrained, and feels a fist tighten around her heart. “If you think that, you’re a fool, Jon Snow,” she says.

“I wish I was,” he says. “Maybe everything would have been easier, then.”

Maybe it would have been, she thinks. If he’d been a fool, maybe she wouldn’t have wanted him so, wouldn’t have gone back to him again and again to flirt with danger and pain, like a woman trying to grasp a flame. Maybe it would have been easier if she was a fool, and too dull and stupid to count the cost of what they’d done.

But they were who they were, and nothing could change that.

Overhead, the dragons bellow, calling to one another, and the sound reminds her sharply of Narnia, of the wild, fresh feeling carried in the breezes there, the way the seas make skin tingle, how even the food tastes stronger, the wine sweeter.

_I would have liked to see Narnia again,_ she thinks. _And Lucy_.

Behind the Wall, death waits; she does not mean to live through the battle, and knows, with a sudden clarity, that Jon does not either.

“I don’t regret it,” she says to him, fiercely. “Not any of it.” It was always meant to be this way, she thinks, as he looks at her, smiling just a little, and still looking so, so sad. “I would do it all again, if I had to choose. I could have a hundred lifetimes and still choose you, every time.”

“You’ll always be my Queen,” he says, his voice pitched low, just for her, and kisses her; a proper, soft kiss full of longing and slow, smoldering desire.

“Jon,” she calls, as he turns to leave her; when he looks back, she says, “Put your hair back, you idiot; it’ll get in your eyes,” and smiles through tears when he laughs for her, one last time.

_

There is only one problem with their glorious, tragic plan: They live.

_We’re quite good at doing that when we meant not to,_ she reflects, looking down from the Wall on the scorched, smoldering battlefield.

Wights, it turns out, are highly flammable, and even the Others cannot raise ashes.

The Great Other does not burn, though; he battles all three of the men she loves, a whirling horror of ice and sinew that she watches, heart in her throat, unable to line up a clear shot.

She watches as Peter is knocked aside with a powerful blow; watches, screaming, as the great sword of ice rises above Ed - 

And watches, falling to her knees, as Jon’s sword plunges through the Other, and the monster out of nightmare shatters into fragments, collapsing along with what is left of his army.

_

Back at Winterfell, days of feasting follow, the Northmen drinking themselves silly right alongside the Narnian Beasts and Daenerys’s quiet Unsullied.

“What will you do now?” Daenerys asks her, as they sit at the high table, watching the men below; Catelyn and Sansa had long since retired, and Arya prefers the company of her friends to that of the Queens, leaving them on their own. Susan watches her carefully, this pale, pretty Queen, and shifts uncomfortably, remembering how she’d sobbed in her arms after Robb’s death, the familiarity too much, too soon.

“I’ll return to my own country, with my brothers and Lady Sansa - Queen Sansa,” she corrects herself. “We’ve done what we came here to do, and have full faith in your rule.”

Daenerys smiles, but Susan suspects she’s well aware of the diplomatic, careful flattery that must always take place between rulers.

“I’m glad someone does,” she says, looking out over the assembled crowd. “I had thought it would be so easy, coming home again - but it isn’t like that at all.”

“It is never easy to rule, Your Grace,” Susan says. “Though I admit, it is easier when you have help.” She smiles fondly and gestures with her glass to the tables below, where Ed and Peter sit with a great cluster of Beasts and men, being regaled with some Westrosi song about a bear that sounds rather filthy, as she pauses to listen.

“My friends call me Dany,” the dragon queen says, and gives her a long, assessing look. “I should like it if we could be friends. I seem to have so few of them.”

“Then you must call me Susan,” she says, and takes Dany’s hand on impulse, pressing it gently.

“Do you miss your husband?” Dany says, the suddenness of her question knocking Susan off balance, Robb’s ghost hovering at her shoulder.

“I - I hardly knew him, really,” she says. The wine has loosened her tongue, and besides, she thinks, what does it profit her to lie to this woman of all people, who knows none of them and surely cares little enough? “He was a good man, and a good leader. Maybe he would have been a good husband too. But we had so little time together.”

Dany nods. “My husband was much the same,” she says. “Though I loved my sun-and-stars greatly - and you, I think, did not love Robb.”

Susan feels her heart skip a beat, but betrays nothing, her face still. “Why would you think that?”

“Dragons do not fly so very high,” Dany says. “And moonlight shows everything for miles. I saw you and Jon Snow kiss, that night. And I don’t think it was the first time.”

Susan says nothing, waiting to see where this is leading, what exactly her purpose is in bringing this to light.

“Don’t worry,” Dany says. “I don’t judge you; it’s only natural. He’s a very handsome man,” she says, giving Susan a knowing look, and Susan dissolves into giggles, relieved when Dany laughs with her, for the moment just two normal girls, sharing a secret.

“He is a problem for me, though,” Dany says, sobering. “He’s a great hero for his part in the battle, and very popular with the Northmen and the wildlings - just look at them.” It’s true, Susan knows; Jon is surrounded by a great group of men, urging him to tell his part in the battle again and again, pressing drinks on him, hanging on his every word. She watches him and thinks how ill at ease he looks, overwhelmed by the press. _You did not want Robb’s life after all_, she thinks. _But you have a piece of it, even so_. “They will want him to be King in the North,” Dany says. “I could do it, if I chose. His brother is a child still, and men do not look kindly on cripples; even less so than they do on women,” she says, mouth twisting. “But my alliance was with your brothers, your husband, and you. What do you say, Susan?” she asks. “Should Jon Snow be King in the North?”

Susan shakes her head, firmly. “He would never accept, never. His family and his honor mean everything to him. There can be no King in the North but Bran.”

“Very well,” Dany says, and smiles; Susan feels she’s passed some obscure test, somehow, and carried Jon along with her. “But I don’t think he can stay here. If he does, he will usurp his brother, whether he intends to or not. And I do not want him in the south. I will have no Kings, crowned or otherwise, in my realm.”

Susan shivers, watching Dany watch Jon, her eyes narrowed.

_There are always more battles in this place,_ she thinks. _I am weary with it, and I want to go home_.

_

When she slips into Jon’s chambers that night, it is with some difficulty as the castle is so crowded, and so full of people who seemingly have no desire to sleep.

In the end, she only manages with Fergus’s grumbling help, after she looks him in the eye and says, “I love him, Fergus. Please, if you love me at all, help me.”

“I know that,” Fergus says, with a huff. “I’ll remind you that I have an _excellent_ nose, Your Grace. One which has been very offended of late, I might add.”

“Oh, hush,” she says, rubbing his snout as she used to do when he was a pup. It earns her an evil glare, but he scouts the passageways for her nonetheless, letting her slip through them unnoticed.

“I didn’t expect you to come,” Jon says, as she shuts the door behind her, as softly as possible.

“I didn’t expect to come either,” she admits, sitting on the edge of his bed, looking down at him. His hair is spilled across the pillows in wild disary, and she smiles fondly, tracing a curl with her fingertip. “You know that my brothers and I will leave, now,” she says; a statement, not a question. The Greyjoy fleet is being prepared to return them to Narnia as they speak, along with the few Narnian ships that remain. Her bride price, paid in full.

“I know,” he says, and takes her hand in his, pulling her down to lie next to him, curled up against his body, the curves of hers fitting the hollows in his.

“What will you do?” she asks, softly; her pride will not allow her to ask what she truly wants.

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice bleak. “I can’t stay here. Lady Catelyn won’t have me, even if Bran would.”

“The new Queen won’t have you, either,” she warns him. “Your popularity with the people makes her too nervous, and she is not a woman I would care to make nervous.”

In the dim light, she watches his face stretch into a wide smile; watches as silent, repressed laughter rocks his frame. “It’s just perfect,” he says, when he regains control. “Here I am, and I’ve been a hero and saved my people, done everything I dreamed of when I was small - and I’m still not wanted anywhere.”

It is, she knows, now or never; her life will brighten beyond measure, or it will fade, and leave her always a shadow of what she might have been. She breathes, in the silence, in and out, and takes his hand.

“You are wanted somewhere.” _Come with me,_ she wants to say, but doesn’t. She had promised not to ask him for anything, and she intends to keep to that, and let him choose for himself.

He doesn’t shift, doesn’t look at her at all; but neither does he pull his hand away. She can feel it grasping and flexing against hers, as he always does when thinking; feels the old burn scars pressed against her palm. “How can I take what was his?” he asks, finally. “All our lives, there was nothing we wouldn’t share, except Winterfell. And you.” The silence stretches out between them, taut, and Robb’s face rises to her mind, unbidden, the way he had looked the last time she had seen him, so pleased with her farewell kiss. _I’m so sorry,_ she says, to his ghost. _Please, let us go_.

“I asked for his forgiveness, the day we laid him to rest in the crypt,” Jon says, echoing her thoughts. “I didn’t get an answer.”

“Did you really expect one?” she asks. “The dead are at peace, Jon. Let him rest. What purpose does it serve, for us to be miserable now? You wouldn’t love him any more if you loved me less.”

“I betrayed him” he says, closing his eyes against the sight of her.

“Maybe so,” she said, her throat tight. “But it’s done now, and we can’t undo that. So let it be for _something_, rather than nothing at all.”

Beside her, Jon takes a deep breath, and when he shifts, moving to kiss her, she feels the shard of guilt buried in her heart loosen, and slip, and dissolve into nothingness.

When she kisses him back, it is free, and clear, and holds nothing but love.

_

When they board the _Queen Helen_ to return to Narnia, Edmund boards with them, and she raises an eyebrow in his direction. “What, not staying behind for the dragon queen?” she asks.

Ed shudders. “Not on your life. She’s a beautiful woman, but she rather terrified me, to be frank. I think I’ll keep the beard, though.”

She laughs, and waits, Fergus at her side.

Soon enough, a white wolf streaks across the beach, and jumps up the gangplank, his master following.

“Welcome home, Jon,” she says, and holds him tightly as they turn their faces to the west, and Narnia.


End file.
